People have uploaded more than 70 million 360 photos to Facebook since we launched the feature last year. Facebook enables multiple methods for capturing 360 photos and videos, which allow people to share immersive experiences with their communities. If you own a dedicated 360 camera, like the Ricoh Theta S or the Giroptic iO, you can post from the camera directly to Facebook. And now most high-end Android and iOS smartphones have cameras with a panorama mode that can be used for 360 photo capture.
Facebook has developed and deployed several technologies in the past year to optimize the way people create and share 360 content, including 360 capture, 360 video stabilization, and reengineering how we store high-resolution media. Most recently, we’ve been exploring using deep neural nets for automatically reorienting 360 photos, which aims to bring more realistic immersive experiences directly to people’s phones.
Creating high-resolution 360 photos
We recently announced a new capability directly in the Facebook app that allows people to capture a full 360 scene with a novel, unconstrained sweeping UI. The video below shows the Facebook 360 capture in action.