360° Snapshots in Second Life

On 21st October 2021, the 360° Snapshot “Project Viewer” became a Release Candidate as version 6.5.0.564863.

Since 2016 a Second Life “Project Viewer” has been under development by Linden Lab that allows for the creation of 360° snapshots in Second Life virtual world scenes (see this earlier blog post). After a period of inactivity, a new version 6.4.23.563579 was released on September 3rd, 2021.

The 360° Project Viewer allows for the capture of 360° panorama (equirectangular) snapshots which can be saved to the users’ local computer and then viewed or shared via social media streams, uploaded to sites that support 360° images such as Flickr, or viewed in VR for example via the “360 Photos” app for Oculus Rift. The facility can be accessed via the Viewer menu “World” -> “360 Snapshot”. For convenience, a User Interface button can be added to the menu bar to provide access to the 360° Snapshot Tool, or a link off the standard 2D snapshot tool also opens the 360° tool.

Set a suitable viewer distance for what you want to capture, and I find it best to look round and ensure all content is concurrently visible without refreshing as you look round. Try increasing the viewer cache size if it doesn’t.

Image Quality Choices

All 360° images are created as 4096×2048, 24-bit colour and 96dpi. The quality settings vary in the JPEG image quality saved setting, and hence the file size. All image quality levels looked crisp except for “Preview” which appears blurry.

Click on Thumbnails Below to View Example 360° Images on Flickr

The above 360° images can also be viewed in this Flickr Photostream.

Issues Remaining with Second Life 6.4.23.563579 Project Viewer

1. The “Preview” quality settings appears blurry in all instances. Perhaps a refinement to the quality being created here to make it the minimum that would appear crisp would be useful.
2. When using the “Maximum” quality image setting, a few times some objects in view, such as a sailboat, was only partially rendered. Dropping to the next level down “High” quality appeared to render fine.
3. The 6 sides of the cube “skybox” that are created to form the image can show clear demarcation lines at the sides of the faces… especially when the sky light varies a lot between the directions. The sea level can also appear with a straight edge and corner where the sides of the cube meet. See example to right.

Images from 360° Snapshot Project Viewer 6.5.0.564863