Creating 360 Video with Unity

Desktop VR is great. Currently it is the most immersive digital experience available on the market. There are, however, drawbacks to using desktop VR headsets like the Rift and Vive; what if you need to show off a project to a large group of people. Cardboard VR can work, but even this has its limitations due to compatibility. The easiest way to quickly and easily show off a virtual 3D environment is 360 video on YouTube. During my internship at Geodan I worked on making a series of videos to showcase one of their Geomagine projects in Hoorn.

The video was created using the integrated 360-video recorder in Unity. It did not go without a hitch, as the recorder is fairly limited. One of the things I discovered is that Unity’s recorder does not support rotating the camera’s view and will always face towards the default rotation. Add to this that the 3rd party solution that was previously used, had an issue where it would fail to render certain objects. This meant that, in order to make the deadline, I had to turn the entire world 90 degrees as the scene wasn’t made to accommodate this quirk.

So without any further ado; here is the end result of the video showcasing the “Current scenario”