360° Panorama

A 360° panorama — also called a spherical panorama or equirectangular panorama — is a photographic image that records the complete visual environment surrounding the camera at the moment of capture. Unlike a conventional photograph, which captures only the portion of a scene within the camera's field of view, a 360° panorama records everything: above, below, and all directions horizontally. The viewer can pan, tilt, and zoom within the image after the fact, essentially standing in the space and looking wherever they choose.

The most common format for 360° panoramas is equirectangular projection — a rectangular image in which the horizontal axis represents azimuth (0° to 360°) and the vertical axis represents elevation (−90° to +90°). When this image is mapped onto a sphere, it produces a seamless spherical environment. Most 360° cameras (Insta360, Ricoh Theta, GoPro Max) capture and export in this format natively.

For structural engineers and building surveyors, 360° panoramas offer a fundamentally different form of site documentation than flat photography. A flat photograph is directional — it records what the photographer chose to frame. A 360° panorama is omnidirectional — it records everything the photographer could have seen from that position. This means a single 360° shot taken at a defect location captures not only the defect itself but also the surrounding structural context: adjacent columns, the slab above, the wall behind, and the floor below. A reviewer examining the panorama later has the same spatial awareness that the photographer had on site.

This completeness makes 360° panoramas particularly valuable for condition surveys and inspections. A flat photograph of a crack in a column shows the crack but not the column's position in the structural grid, the condition of adjacent elements, or the geometry of the space. A 360° panorama from the same position shows all of this simultaneously.

The practical barrier to 360° surveying has historically been the difficulty of communicating the spatial location of each panorama within the building. Without a floor plan reference, a library of 360° images is navigable but not spatially indexed — you know what you can see, but not where you were standing. Tools like pin360 resolve this by allowing panoramas to be pinned to coordinates on a PDF floor plan, creating a spatially-indexed record that combines the navigability of an interactive drawing with the completeness of 360° photography.