Ways to move between multiple panoramas - Unity, GearVRf?

Yes, it can be done in Unity.

Basically you would just have a skybox, with the 6 textures that make up a cubemap (or using other supported skybox methods). Then you could create clickable buttons, that would fade in a second skybox. It seems fairly simple to me.

Thank you. That sounds doable.

I just wonder if there's a way to call a function more directly for displaying stills/videos, without having to map them on a geometry.

Do you know how the GearVR actually displays panoramic videos/photos - I don't suppose they're actually mapped to a geometry, since e.g. the Oculus360 Photos and Oculus360 Videos app accept both equirectangularly and cube mapped projections?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify a user actionable entry/exit area (button) on a given bitmap (video or still) through an overlay, and then access the next one with a transition in between.

I am curious about this as well as it would allow the use of very high quality 3D renders as backgrounds for a currated experience as well as interactive games such as Myst, 7th Guest, Resident Evil etc.

Would the follow technique work?
Create a new scene in unity3D, add a sphere and map a 360 equirectangular image to the inside of it, place an invisible plane in the center and the camera at the center point of that. Objects could then be placed as desired and made interactive via gaze/touchpad input.

"chuckleone" wrote:
I am curious about this as well as it would allow the use of very high quality 3D renders as backgrounds for a currated experience as well as interactive games such as Myst, 7th Guest, Resident Evil etc.

Exactly.

Another thing to consider: whether to use cubemapped or equirectangular panoramas - they've now changed the Oculus 360 Photos app to (allegedly) feature the same resolution for both, but up until the most recent version cubemaps could be displayed at a higher resolution (2048 per square instead of the current 1536), which is closer to 6000 x 3000 instead of the equirectangular max of 2048 x 4096. Apparently this difference was because of the way the cubemaps could be loaded in memory when needed, instead of the whole panorama at once.

"Yggdrasilbury" wrote:

"chuckleone" wrote:
I am curious about this as well as it would allow the use of very high quality 3D renders as backgrounds for a currated experience as well as interactive games such as Myst, 7th Guest, Resident Evil etc.

Exactly.

Another thing to consider: whether to use cubemapped or equirectangular panoramas - they've now changed the Oculus 360 Photos app to (allegedly) feature the same resolution for both, but up until the most recent version cubemaps could be displayed at a higher resolution (2048 per square instead of the current 1536), which is closer to 6000 x 3000 instead of the equirectangular max of 2048 x 4096. Apparently this difference was because of the way the cubemaps could be loaded in memory when needed, instead of the whole panorama at once.

Excellent! Thanks for confirmation, I'm working on a new project for the Gear VR that I want to have very complex environments for and I think this method will help increase performance considerably as well as reduce scene lightmap baking time, build time and increase FPS.

I've been playing around with equirectangular panaromas in Blender 3D and rendering to a resolution higher than 2048 x 4096( more like double that). Render time on my Surface Pro 3 has ranged from 15-25 minutes for a single frame so I think I'll drop the resolution down to decrease rendering time as well as the final image size.