Viewing a 360-degree photo

Ever since it was discovered that the Earth is round, cartographers and mariners have struggled with how to project the spherical globe onto a two-dimensional chart. The result is an inevitable distortion of some areas of the globe.

Note

To learn more about map projections and spherical distortions, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection.

For 360-degree media, we typically use an equirectangular (or a meridian) projection where the sphere is unraveled into a cylindrical projection, stretching the texture as you progress toward the North and South poles while keeping the meridians as equidistant vertical straight lines. To illustrate this, consider Tissot's Indicatrix (visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissot%27s_indicatrix for more information) that shows a globe with strategically arranged identical circles (an illustration by Stefan Kühn):

The following image shows the globe unwrapped with an equirectangular projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection...