Capturing the World: 360° Imaging for Geographical Research

360° photograph provides a novel and useful way to capture field sites to share with others and to help with interpretation back at the desk. I have used this approach in a range of applications:

Nepal Street View

Google Street View Is a useful tool when understanding a new place and when the flood hazard work started in Nepal, the country did not have coverage. Therefore, to help us discuss the site, and to help others, we mapped out a some key roads including the Prithvi Highway and Araniko Highway. The system was a Ricoh Theta S mounted on the top of the car with an external GPS logger. The location information was then injected into the images in Adobe Lightroom. The images on Google Maps have been used internally at Durham University for pre-field trip assessment of the spatial pattern of landslides and in total, the images have been viewed over 2.5m times.

Aerial 360° imagery

360 degree images from an elevated platform provide a useful and different perspective on the landscape. Buy viewings the sites from this viewpoint, it is possible to see processes and geomorphic evidence that is difficult to appreciate from the ground. This perspective can be achieved with drone based approaches, such as this image of the Dacre Beck catchment below or with a helicopter, such as the image of the East Rapti catchment in Nepal below.

These images are made in different ways. The drone images are stitched together from a set of 36 still images using PTGUI. The collection of the images is automated using Litchi. The helicopter based images were were from a single shot 360° camera running in time lapse mode. The camera used for this work was an Insta360 One (left photo above).

360 Degree Photography and Education

These images can be used to support education and can be combined together into a virtual tour. Using the Google Expeditions platform, I developed a 360 virtual tour of water management issues in Botswana. This virtual tour covered the source of water, how it is used for horticulture and where there are potential gains in storing the water in shallow sand aquifers.