Notes on FB 360

A collection of things I learned making 360 videos and photos work in Facebook.

tags: vr

Jan 9, 2017

Note: Everything that follows in this post is specific to getting Facebook to recognize media in a 360 degree format, although this may help you with other platforms, most likely YouTube.

Photos

Through searching the Facebook forums, I was initially pointed to this Dropbox folder filled with templates that come embedded with appropriate 360 metadata, with the caveat that you only use the “Save As” option in Photoshop, instead of “Export” or “Save for Web”, because “Save As” is guaranteed to preserve the metadata. And these templates were really useful for some initial messing around with Facebook 360s.

But after a while I found that restricting, wanting to make images without relying on a template every time, and so I decided to search again, until I happened upon this wonderful page outlining how to edit and inject metadata 360 photos right from facebook360.fb.com. It’s here that you can find the original reference to the Dropbox template folder, but more interestingly you see how a program called exiftool can help you inject metadata into a photo:

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exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" photo.jpg

I started using this so much that I made a little alias for it:

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alias vrexif='exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular"'

In fact, you can specify a bunch of different metadata options to control Facebook’s presentation and processing of 360 panoramas:

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# 120º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=18000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=9000 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=2350 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=4300 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 150º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=14400 -FullPanoHeightPixels=7200 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=4200 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=1880 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=3440 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 180º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=12000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=3000 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=1567 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=2867 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 240º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=9000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=4500 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=1500 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=1175 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=2150 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 300º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=7200 -FullPanoHeightPixels=3600 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=600 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=940 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=1720 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 360º h_fov, 86º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=6000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=3000 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=0 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=783 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=1433 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg
# 360º h_fov, 65º v_fov
exiftool -FullPanoWidthPixels=6000 -FullPanoHeightPixels=3000 -CroppedAreaLeftPixels=0 -CroppedAreaTopPixels=958 -CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels=6000 -CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels=1083 -ProjectionType=cylindrical file.jpg

I haven’t played around with these options extensively, but I imagine a shell function for all these options would be convenient.

Video

I wish it were possible to upload GIFs, to save resources and export time, but in lieu of doing that, I’ve started uploading 360 degree videos to satisfy my passion for playing around with motion. At first it was hard to figure out how to do that for Facebook because there’s not a handy guide for injecting metadata in videos like there is for photos, so I tried to take a more general approach and look for general 360 metadata authoring tools.

Using that approach I found this excellent YouTube Help article that led me to the Spatial Media repo. You can certainly compile the application from source, or run it through Python 2.7 commands but I found it much easier to go to the releases section and download the standalone OS X app, Spatial Media Metadata Injector.app. Just hit the “My video is spherical (360)” option in the app and upload and inject the metadata to your video, and it works like a charm! I’m unsure if Facebook supports stereoscopic video (I presume so, because of Oculus, but it might just attempt automatic conversion into that format) or binaural (e.g. “spatial”) audio, but those metadata options you can set in this app too!

Here’re a couple of my Facebook posts that were made in the process of me figuring all of this out:


— Andres Cuervo

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