The words of 360° tours, in plain English

A photo of everything around the camera: all the way round, and up and down too. Also called a 360° panorama, a spherical panorama or a photo sphere. Viewers let you drag or turn your phone to look in any direction.

A set of 360° photos linked together so a visitor can move from room to room, usually with notes, pictures, video and a floor plan added. Panoramr calls each photo in a tour a scene or a panorama.

The usual flat file for a 360° photo: the sphere unrolled into a rectangle exactly twice as wide as it is tall, the way a world map unrolls the globe. The top and bottom edges look stretched. Panoramr takes equirectangular JPEG and TIFF files.

Another way to store a 360° photo: six square pictures, one for each face of a cube around the camera (front, back, left, right, up and down). Panoramr accepts the six faces as well as an equirectangular file.

Joining the pictures taken by several lenses, or several shots, into one 360° photo. A 360° camera’s own app stitches its two fisheye pictures for you; photographers using a camera on a panoramic head stitch with desktop software.

The seam where two lenses’ pictures meet. Objects close to the camera on that seam can look broken or doubled, so keep people and furniture a little away from the camera’s sides.

Parallax is the shift between near and far objects when the lens moves. Turning a camera round its lens’s nodal point, also called the no-parallax point, avoids it, which is why panoramic heads exist for shooting 360° photos with an ordinary camera.

The point straight below the camera. In a 360° photo it shows the tripod or the photographer’s feet, so it is usually covered by a round patch or retouched away. In Panoramr a tour shows a patch there: Panoramr’s badge, or your own logo on a hosted tour.

The point straight above the camera: the ceiling or the sky.

Bracketing takes several exposures of the same view, darker and brighter; HDR (high dynamic range) merges them so a bright window and a dark corner both keep their detail. Many 360° cameras have an HDR mode for interiors.

How much of the scene a viewer shows at once, measured in degrees. Zooming in narrows it. In Panoramr each tour sets the zoom its scenes open at.

The direction a visitor faces when a scene opens: the heading is left to right, the pitch up and down. Setting it opens each room on its best side.

A marker placed in a scene that does something when clicked: walks to another room, or opens a note, a picture, a video, a sound or a link. Panoramr also has surface media, which fixes a picture, video or text onto a flat spot in the photo.

A small map of the building shown in a corner of a tour, with a pin for each scene and a radar cone that turns with the visitor’s view.

Google’s name for a 360° photo saved as a JPEG with extra data inside that marks it as a full sphere. Google Maps and Street View read that data to show the photo as a 360° view.

A short piece of HTML, usually an iframe, that shows a tour inside another web page. You paste it into your website’s page builder, and the tour plays there.

Shown without the software maker’s branding, so the tour carries only yours or your client’s. In Panoramr a hosted tour has no Panoramr start screen or badge.

A 360° photo drawn as if seen from above a tiny globe, with the ground curled into a small round world. It is a popular way to share a 360° photo as an ordinary picture.

Panoramr’s hosting for one tour, bought for a set term: the tour is shown without Panoramr’s branding while the Vault runs.