360 Tours On Your iPhone 2.0 – Well Sort Of

On Friday I managed to update my “old” iPhone to 2.0 software. I think iPhone apps and the iTunes app store are the most significant feature of the recent Apple iPhone upgrade circus.

Since I’m a hopelessly addicted 360 image geek the first iPhone app I downloaded from the store was the PangeaVR 360 image viewer by Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software. The fascinating part of the app is how the image slowly floats from landscape to portrait mode as you move the phone around and how you move the pano around by dragging you finger on the face of the display.

Brian’s design is simple and elegant! All you have do to allow a group of existing panos to be displayed on the iPhone is build a few lines of xml that has links to equirectangular JPGs for panoramas that you want to display.

Just for fun, I decided to make a iPhone version of the 360 tour of my Rental home. It took about 15 minutes and the result looks like this. iPhone users that have the free PangeaVR app and type in “http://lohrman.com/7318fairway.xml” into the “enter url” area of Pangea VR to display the tour.

Yea, I know, it’s pretty geeky and not terribly practical but it’s a lot of fun. I’d really rather have Flash on the iPhone but that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.