Using 360 images for previsual work in accurate real world scale

I'm very much an old school dev too and tbh I see that as an advantage over the generation of younger devs who can rely on everyone having RTX 4000 series GPUs or XR2 Gen 2 chipsets on standalone. They have it easy compared to those of us who learned our trade optimising for GearVR and other antiquated platforms 😄

If you do opt with pure 360, perhaps a simple SBS (side-by-side) stereoscopic cubemap might do the trick ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDpOOOF0Xlk / https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/SkyboxPanoramicShader/blob/master/Skybox-PanoramicBeta.shader ) but of course you'll never get the parallax right and properly mitigate against that head on a stick view inside the skydome.

Some advice I came across years ago re. optimisation that really stuck with me was the concept of treating your scenes in terms of near-field, mid-range and distance. Optimising is not about decimating every elements in your environment in the same way, it's more about treating each asset depending on how far it lies from the player (which of course requires you to know where your player might be able to move). The Home environments are a good masterclass on this design aproach. So, just to prove there's no sell by date on quality, this video might be old but it's still pure gold in terms of explaining this concept of 'the range of perception': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYYdvtf2DhQ&list=PL4p5NRamFPnitdsEKV8GpY3DllccH-mzl&index=40&t=909s