Capturing the World

A while back I bought myself a Ricoh Theta V 360 camera with the intent of using it to capture 360 panoramas to add to Street View. I kind of regret it. I tried a few times to capture 360 image sequences but the quality was terrible and the workflow experience was basically unusable on a number of fronts.

However, as the days and years have gone by, the world has changed. The old Street View app has been replaced by the new Street View Studio, which promises to give a much smoother experience. So, I figured I'd give things another shot (pun intended).

To make the physical part of the experience more pleasant, I bought myself two items: an extendable monopod selfie stick thing, and a phone holder which, while intended for bicycles, would work perfectly to strap my phone to the handle of the monopod.

So far, so good. Though, I will say that taking this picture was a bit of a challenge.

The bottom of the monopod folds out into a wee little tripod, which has a small footprint so that it doesn't show up (or is at least easy to crop out) in 360 shots.

Of course it doesn't make much sense to use it like this, it's really intended to be extended when using it with the tripod legs.

But I didn't buy it to use it like this. What I bought it for was to use it with the legs folded and the telescoping rod extended, so I could walk around outside taking 360 photos like this.

And yes, I know this isn't showing up as a scrollable/spinnable 360 photo. Just pretend it's working.

However, there's just one itty bitty little problem left: Ricoh never updated the Theta V to work with the new Street View Studio. They updated the newer (and more expensive) 360 cameras, but never bothered to restore the functionality to the V.

Now I've never been fully satisfied with the V in other ways, notably its relatively poor dynamic range and lousy overall image quality (chromatic aberration, shitty focus on one side, probably some other issues I'm forgetting) so I'm not going to be sad to replace it, but at the same time I'd rather it just work (in every aspect) than have to buy a new camera.

At least this time I'll learn my lesson and NOT buy a Ricoh.