Thank you.

I don't have the patch with me at the moment, but I'll share what I can. It is, in fact, fairly simple. Any 360º video player just maps the image to a sphere and lets you pan around with a virtual camera.

The very first thing I did is pretty easy to replicate. I found a random equirectangular 360º image and a .3ds Moon model on the internet, stuck them together in a 3D Player, and it worked. Mostly. You'll need to set the 3D Player's destination to renderer and then create a Virtual Stage as your camera. There's a bunch of angle/position settings to adjust, but it's fairly straightforward.

What I'm doing now is a bit more custom - I'm taking multiple live camera feeds and combining them to get a live partial-360 panorama. The 'sphere' is actually made up of multiple curved surfaces, each with its own 3D Player, and custom-made for the shape of the camera lens. That gets a bit tricky, but it works pretty well.

I'd never used Blender before working on this, and what I use it for here is pretty basic and easy to get the hang of. This tutorial video was a huge resource, though obviously I diverged a bit from it.

Feel free (anyone) to email or message me too if you want to talk about it. I'll try to remember to post the patch when I get back to my desktop next week.

A couple tricks:

- adjust y axis (tilt) with the 3D Player, and x (pan) and zoom with the Virtual Stage. Using the Virtual Stage for both pan & tilt is... non-intuitive.

- the default settings for a Virtual Stage include a small positive value in the Z direction. Setting this back to zero should center the camera.

- Whatever I'm doing to make the blender models, the texture always winds up on the outside of the sphere (which isn't visible from a camera at the centre of the sphere). Rather than trying to fix my 3D model, I decided to just check 'render back' in the 3D Player settings. Easy.

I would be very interested to try out what you described in terms of the Blender sphere with the 360 degree video texture and a virtual stage "camera" inside it, if you're willing to share your method. If not, no worries :)

2) Someone once suggested writing a GLSL shader to display a 360 video (which may be simpler if you know how to do it), but I've been doing 360º playback by building a simple 3d sphere in Blender, using the video as the texture, and putting a virtual stage "camera" at the centre of the sphere. That works fine for me, where I'm just panning around in a 360 image/video.