Scenes & images
360° or flat: which to use
How the two projections behave, and how to avoid the stretched-image problem.
Flat
Use this for ordinary photographs, floor plans, diagrams and screenshots. Learners pan and zoom within the image. Pins are anchored to a point on the picture.
A good flat photograph is not second best. It holds pins the same way, publishes the same way, and carries an activity the same way — a picture taken on your phone of the classroom, the playground or a page of a Victorian schoolbook works exactly as well as a panorama for most of what people build. Choose 360° when being in the space is the point, and flat the rest of the time.
Flat images rarely fill the viewport, so the space around them is painted with the scene's backdrop colour. Set it to something that belongs with the image — a dark neutral behind a photograph, white behind a plan.
360° spherical
Use this for equirectangular photos — the very wide 2:1 images a 360° camera produces. Learners drag to look around and can pan a full circle. Pins are anchored to a direction, so they stay put as the view moves.
A spherical image must be a true equirectangular capture. A wide panorama stitched from a phone is usually not, and will look bowed.
If you want one and have no camera, there are three places to look: borrow or hire one for a day, search the Stock tab (some providers carry equirectangular images, though far fewer than flat ones), or ask whether anyone else in your organisation has already put one in the asset library. If none of those works out, use a flat photograph. You lose nothing that matters.
An ordinary photo, diagram, map or screenshot.
- Anything a camera or a drawing tool made
- The learner sees all of it at once
- Best for diagrams, artworks and maps
A panorama that surrounds the learner.
- Needs an equirectangular photo, twice as wide as it is tall
- The learner drags to look around
- Best for places: a room, a site, a workshop
Getting it wrong is obvious
A spherical image shown flat looks stretched at the top and bottom. A flat image shown spherical bows in the middle and can be spun past its own edge. If a scene looks odd, check the projection first.
Image size
Upload the best version you have. Panova re-encodes an image once, as it arrives, and keeps a scene backdrop at up to 4096px wide on the default quality setting — sharp across a 360° view without storing detail nobody will ever see.
The original is not kept, so this is a one-way trip. Keep your masters somewhere else, and do not shrink a panorama before uploading it: see What happens to an image when you upload it.