I'm a new Oculus GearVR dev and I am wondering what is the best way to get the stereo HIGH-RES 360 Photo into the GearVR? We are making a custom photo app for displaying 360 Photos inside of Unity.
Are these photos exposed in Unity via a Plugin or the SDK? There are limitations to using cube maps and skybox inside Unity for higher resolution images as I understand it. So yes, I could make a skybox with cube maps but the image quality would be nowhere near where it is with the native 360 Photos.
Any ideas on this from Oculus or anyone who is Unity knowledgeable on the GearVR. Basically I want to use the OTOY renderings to make a nice slideshow in a custom app for the GearVR, but want to make sure it is possible to keep the quality the same as what we see in the native 360 Photos.
I too am wondering why it seems that only the 360Photos app shows high quality panos. 360Stories, the Youvisit app all show much lower quality, spoiling the experience quite a bit!
As a full time 360 photographer I really yearning to an app that makes it possible to view single panos and tours in HQ and that are easy to create and publish/share.
I believe the 360 Photo API is not exposed or is not integrated into Unity. If that is true and I believe it is I will bet Oculus and Unity are working to resolve this.
As a side note Unity 5 will support 8192 x 8192 textures but it is bound by the GPU and is most likely targeted at the PC. 4096x4096 is likely the highest you can go, and I would be curious what happens when you switch a texture out at that resolution.
So it appears currently the only way the 360 photos can be displayed in HIGH-RES is through the built in 360 Photo viewer. I have used Skyboxes and cube maps before in Unity but you are right the images is lower res with this method.
It may be possible to use the SDK and not Unity to do this, but then you are locked out of the other benefits that Unity provides. I would like to hear from Oculus on this. Elsewhere in the forum I see where this is being discussed but I don't think I see a definitive answer, other than they are aware it's a "Feature" that the devs want.
I have heard of some people using 360 video apps to display a single frame in High-Res but this is not the same as creating your own image viewer or integration of these High-Res images into your Unity app.
> using 360 video apps to display a single frame in High-Res
Actually video res is at a much bigger disadvantage. Video has to go through mpeg4 decompression and is limited to 2k vertical resolution. Compare resolution of still images and video and still has a lot more resolution so I don't thin anyone is using video player to display high res stills.
There are certainly speed and quality differences between using native support versus going through unity. Speed is more of a problem for video. Unity and unreal have a difficult time placing another abstraction layer or two on top of the media player and making it general purpose, unlike a native player.
In the past there were also hardwired texture resolution limits in Unity, even if the hardware allowed it. There still seem to be some anomalies between image size and texture resolution supported. And the shapes in unity, such as the sphere, have no parameters so you can't control the number of facets/vertices. In that case you have to build a sphere in another app and import it.
actually the Otoy OcateVR pano's are 18432x1536 stereo or 9216x1536 mono cubemaps, so there is probably some Carmack magic going on in there...
i wonder if that cubemap tech is something exclusive or exposed trough the SDK ...
hmm... a side idea pops up here... another reason gear VR needs basic positional tracking for leaning ... that would allow leaning in lightfield pano's...
edit: found a link that discusses this a bit... with more info on the reddit link :
