I’ve been looking at desktop viewers to compare the quality, responsiveness and features of 360 viewers as I work on my own image viewer demos.
Simple Panorama Viewer from RTVR has a 5/5 rating on the Microsoft Store based on 4 ratings.
Although the number of ratings is low, the 5/5 star rating caught my attention.
After installation, you can start it from the normal Windows menu.
The viewer starts up with a blank scene that reminds me of a Unity editor.
Add images by clicking on the button in the lower left. Unlike the RICOH desktop viewer, I couldn’t find a way to drag and drop the image into the scene.
Quality looks excellent
There is no shimmering as I can sometimes see with the RICOH desktop viewer.
Zoom out works great.
Zoom.
mouse over equirectangular view
In the side list of images, there is a nice feature to show the full equirectangular image as a pop-out window. The file size is also listed.
easy navigation of images
The viewer has Prev and Next buttons when more than one image is in the list. This is the view when I mouse over the menu.
zoom of 11k image
zoom comparison to RICOH THETA Viewer
RICOH THETA Viewer on right at maximum zoom. Simple Panorama Viewer has greater zoom.
zoom out
RICOH THETA viewer on right.
restore previous session on start
advantages over RICOH THETA Basic App desktop viewer
- deeper zoom than RICOH THETA Viewer
- faster startup time
- image is more stable (does not shimmer) during panning
- panning is faster
- shows list of images available in viewer in a panel on the left
- panel has mouse-over view of equirectangular image for preview
disadvantages
- does not appear to have a drag and drop way to add images
- does not appear to have automatic pan
- has less zoom out