In order to help developers use THETA images in their projects, @jcasman and I have been working on a demonstration of THETA images in Unity Skybox. This video tutorial covers the steps.
We’ve prepared four scenes. Each scene only takes a few minutes to build. It would be better if @jcasman had supplied me with images of scenery without people. It’s better if the scene is taken outside. For example night sky, mountain view, canyon, agricultural field, city landscape.
This is the original scene taken outdoor in front of a museum by my daughter.
Cool how the color of the sky image reflects some on the objects below. In this case the green of the auroras. That’s automatic? You didn’t actively do that, correct?
Correct. There’s a light source inside of Unity. (the light is virtual). It reflects off the sky. Unity handles the shadows and lighting automatically. The shadows and lighting change as the player walks around the scene.
It’s all automatic. It only takes a few minutes to create a scene. Right now, I didn’t link together multiple scenes, but it’s easy to change the skybox image (the background) when the character moves around.
I think this could be useful to quickly build thousands of scenes from places all over the world and allow the in-game character to shift between places quickly.
This is the bare minimum needed to see an image in Unity. I haven’t looked into changing the perspective of the skybox with player movement. For example, zooming in on the image as the player gets closer or lowering the image when the player jumps.
The images seem usable as a background mockup or a background for a virtual tour where the main point of interest is something else in the foreground.
In these examples, the 360 image is used for the skybox, the “sky” of your scene. You can drop a terrain on the floor of your scene. In these examples, the bird and dog are 3D models, I imported into the scene.
