360 CGI panorama on Facebook

Hi there! Today I'm here to talk about a new feature recently introduced by Facebook: 360 panorama. VR's (virtual reality) recent increase in popularity has made features like this more and more desired by marketing agencies and investors all around the world and rightly so! It does give you some amazing new possibilities to pressent your investment. Right now though this feature is still being developed and has some massive limitations when it comes down to CGI. Unfortunately at this point you can't just stick a simple 360 panorama jpg and hope it'll work. That's because an image like that, in the end, doesn't actually contain any camera or lens data, which means that Facebook is unable to recognize it as a 360 image. Further more (if I'm not mistaken) you can currently create a 360 photo only with newer Samsung Galaxy devices, iOS devices and specifically design 360 cameras (full list here). There is a workaround though and you can find it below.

Ok, first of all you'll unfortunately need a device that can create a 360 photo. In my case I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Google Camera App. Inside the app I've selected a photo sphere and started creating one:

After this process you should end up with an image like this:

Download that photo onto your PC and open it up in Photoshop together with your 360 CGI. What you have to do right now is scale up (or down, depending on the size of your panorama) your photo so that you'll be able to paste your cgi into it.

One thing and this is important: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE ASPECT RATIO OF YOUR PHOTO AS IT WILL LOOSE THE LENS DATA AND WON'T WORK ANYMORE!!!

After saving this image all you have to do is drag and drop it to Facebook and it will be automatically converted to a 360 panorama. That's it!

Ok, there is one more thing. I do realize that not everyone has the hardware to record such a photo so below you can download the above panorama, which you can use to overlay and create your own one. 

Happy 360ing

Simon