Lecture 9: Immersive 360° Image Editing

The digital sessions for the Applied Professional Practice module began today. The learning objective of this session was on editing 360° images, this is a topic I am vaguely familiar with thanks to last year's session with Photography Lecturer Oliver Steve.

The best way to create these images is by using a GoPro camera, these can be accessed through the equipment store at university. Surprisingly enough there isn't an obscure software needed to edit these photographs. You can just utilise Adobe Photoshop, which is how I chose to proceed with the learning materials.

I found this session repetitive as it was based on the same 360° image editing lecture delivered last year. Ultimately I didn't feel I learnt anything new but it was a good refresher. I will say that my view on 360° images has changed drastically since last year. Previously I hadn’t seen them as a very resourceful means of communicating ideas, however with the current situation revolving around the pandemic 360° images are quite useful as they are digital and immersive allowing you to present an immersive scene. Physically attending a real life set, you are able to explore the whole 360 degrees of the space however with the Covid making this impossible, we're limited to photographs which only focus on a single frame. Photographs taken from all 360 degrees create a circular image which constructs an immersive experience allowing for the viewing of the whole design.

This lecture got me thinking about our current situation and how an alternative to seeing and handling a physical model or set would be a 360° image which allows you to really immerse someone within your set remotely. I’m intrigued by the idea of an interactive 360° image of my own work presented online within my portfolio and plan to explore the possibilities. Last year due to the Covid 19 Pandemic, we were unable to build out BATAR sets but it’s exciting to learn I could explore the concept of constructing a 360° image of my SketchUp model, in order to communicate my ideas in a new and constructive way. Discussions with my peers only furthered my fascination with 360° images as it opened my eyes to the ways we can use 360° images now. This is what ultimately led me to photographing models that I have made previously to construct a new view point of my modelled set.