Oculus 360 Photos

Oculus 360 Photos
Information
Type	360-degree panoramic photo viewer
Developer	Oculus VR
Operating System	Android (Gear VR), Windows (Rift)
Supported Devices	Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift
Release Date	2014
Website	Meta Store listing

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Oculus 360 Photos is a discontinued first-party virtual reality application made by Oculus VR for viewing 360-degree panoramic still images inside a head-mounted display. It was one of four sample experiences (alongside Oculus Home, Oculus Cinema and Oculus 360 Videos) that Oculus announced with the Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition on September 3, 2014, and it later shipped on the Oculus Rift.

The app displayed curated spherical photographs as immersive scenes the viewer could look around by turning the head, and it could also show a user's own panoramas loaded from device storage. Its categories on the store were exploration, education and utility, with an age rating of 3 and up. Meta removed Oculus 360 Photos from the Rift Store on June 15, 2023; people who already had it in their library kept access to their installed copy.

Background

Oculus 360 Photos originated as part of the early mobile VR software stack that Oculus built for the Gear VR, a headset developed jointly by Samsung and Oculus that used a Samsung Galaxy phone as its display and processor. The Innovator Edition shipped to developers for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Oculus described the bundled apps as beta software that would receive updates before the consumer launch.

Oculus distributed 360 Photos as an open-source sample with its Mobile SDK rather than only as a finished store product. The viewer for panoramic stills lived in the SDK's native sample set, which let developers study and reuse the rendering code for their own 360-degree content.

Content and Getty Images

The app presented professional photography organized into browsable categories such as landscapes, landmarks, cityscapes and underwater scenes. In June 2015 Getty Images published a collection of 360-degree imagery to the app, drawn from its archive and made available to view for free. The set included scenic locations and event coverage, and Getty's vice president of editorial content, Hugh Pinney, said the company had "unrivaled 360 degree imagery" from its photographers. At the time the Getty content was live on Gear VR, with availability on Oculus Home for the Rift tied to that headset's consumer release, then planned for the first quarter of 2016.

How it worked

A 360-degree panorama is a single image that records the full sphere of view from one point. Oculus 360 Photos mapped such an image onto the inside of a sphere (or onto the faces of a cube) surrounding the viewer's virtual position, so that head rotation revealed different parts of the scene at the headset's frame rate. The viewer did not move through the scene; the experience was rotational only, which kept the rendering light enough for a phone-powered headset.

The app accepted JPEG images in two projections. Meta's developer documentation recommends a 4096x2048 equirectangular projection panorama for use in 360 Photos, or a cube map at 1536x1536 pixels per face for viewing in the app through its overlay code; 1024x1024 cube maps were intended for games rather than the photo viewer. The table below summarizes the recommended image formats.

Projection	Recommended resolution	Use in 360 Photos
Equirectangular	4096x2048	Recommended for 360 photos and games
Cube map	1536x1536 per face	For viewing in 360 Photos with the overlay code
Cube map	1024x1024 per face	For games, not the photo viewer

On Gear VR, the viewer opened from the Oculus Home library; the user could swipe the headset touchpad to switch image categories, tap to bring up a list view, and turn the head to look around each panorama. On the Rift, the app could also show a user's own panoramas: Meta's instructions direct users to place panoramic image files in a folder so the app can read and display them, letting people view personal 360 photos without a separate tool.

Role in VR and AR

Oculus 360 Photos was part of the first wave of media-playback software that defined what early consumer VR could do beyond games. Viewing 360-degree stills and video was one of the main reasons buyers picked up a Gear VR in 2014 and 2015, and Oculus's own 360 Photos and 360 Videos apps, together with Oculus Cinema, gave the platform that capability out of the box. Bundling these viewers established the panoramic photo and video viewer as a standard category of headset app, a role later filled on Meta's standalone headsets by apps such as Meta Quest TV and by 360 support in the system gallery.

The app also helped seed a content pipeline. By giving photographers and stock libraries like Getty Images a place to publish spherical images for free, it created demand for 360-degree cameras and encouraged the equirectangular JPEG as a common interchange format for VR panoramas. Because Oculus shipped the viewer's rendering code as an open-source Mobile SDK sample, developers could reuse its sphere and cube-map drawing for their own apps, which spread a consistent approach to displaying panoramic stills across early Gear VR titles.

Discontinuation

Meta retired several of the original first-party Rift experiences as it shifted focus to its standalone Quest line. Oculus 360 Photos was removed from the Rift Store on June 15, 2023, the same period in which Meta wound down other legacy Rift software. The store listing notes that the app is no longer available for new downloads, while users who already owned it retained their copy.