A new version of Photo Sphere Viewer has just been released, with some new small features. There are no revolutionary things, but most of them have been asked by some users, so it was important to implement them.

Modified options

Before seeing the new options, there are some that now accept other values. I think about the long_offset and lat_offset options that now allow the use of degrees, as other options that except for an angle as a value.

One of the two required options has also been updated: the container one. Until now you had to give it an HTML element (generally a div). In Photo Sphere Viewer 2.5, you can use a string instead: the ID of an HTML element. So, if you use an ID, the corresponding HTML element will be retrieved, and you won’t have to do it by yourself.

Zoom!

A new option is available to control the zoom feature. More precisely, this new option is here to control the way the user can zoom. It’s a boolean, named allow_scroll_to_zoom. By default it is set to true and the user can zoom in and out by scrolling over the panorama. You can disable this feature by setting this option to false.

In PSV 2.5 you will also find a new public method to retrieve the current zoom level: getZoomLevel(). It returns a number between 0 and 100.

Some other features

Maybe you tried the VR mode appeared recently. I adjusted the eyes offset with a Google Carboard, but maybe you use another system or, more surely, you don’t have the exact same eyes offset than me. That’s why I created a new option: eyes_offset, allowing you to adjust this offset by yourself. In the future, I think about adding a button in the navigation bar, to let any user adjust this offset.

Since some versions, if CORS is enabled on a server, you can display distant panoramas with PSV. However, it was anonymous so it didn’t allow the use of credentials. If you want to, you can set the option cors_anonymous to false and you will be able to use credentials.

A new action is available: position-updated, triggered each time the position is changed, in any way.

Finally, if your panorama is a Google Photo Sphere one, Photo Sphere Viewer will read the XMP data. However, if you resized the panorama, these data are wrong. Now, Photo Sphere Viewer can detect wrong data and automatically recalculate the new dimensions.

What’s next?

Last time, I talked about Photo Sphere Viewer 3.0. You will be happy to learn that I worked on it. As I said before, I’ll create my own 3D engine for PSV 3.0, and I already have a working engine. However, it still needs some improvements. I don’t think Photo Sphere Viewer 3.0 will be here before the end of the year, but early 2016 is a good target.