Circularity

So I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a new 360 camera to replace my Theta-V which Ricoh never bothered to update to support the new streetview system (and which was kind of a terrible camera in the first place).

Rather than send Ricoh more money for their newer cameras, I decided it would be more prudent to spend my dollars with a company that seems more interested in actually serving its customers. So, I bought a Insta360 X3 instead. Here's hoping this isn't a grave mistake.

Below is a quick test video I shot in my back yard. Except that the video embed doesn't seem to enable the 360 controls, so you might just end up seeing a fixed panning shot of the back of my house rather than the full 360 glory.

I also took a still photo, which I used to be able to upload in such a way that it was navigable, but sadly that got broken a while back due to an unrelated change with how Blogger serves images, so you'll just have to put up with it looking weird and distorted. It's at least somewhat viewable in the middle.

I have yet to try an actual street view capture, but so far I have high hopes of it working at least reasonably well.

As an aside, it does annoy me that nobody seems to care about maintaining technology, or keeping different systems working with each other. It feels like this entire escapade is just one long story of companies half-assing things and leaving their customers to pick up the pieces. It's a damn shame.