These VR panorama photographs were taken on my phone, a Google Pixel, using Google's Cardboard Camera. Viewing them in the Daydream headset is one of the strongest VR experiences I've encountered yet. Particularly, having taken the photographs myself, I am viscerally reminded of the place photographed. In the VR headset, the audio tracks with the view as you move through the space adding an additional level of dimension. I was curious how Google's VR View web embed widget would translate the experience. The customized JPEG image that Cardboard Camera creates has to be converted using this converter utility (only works for me in Chrome) which produces a stereoscopic JPEG and a MP4 file for the audio. Unfortunately, the embed widget can't use both of these source files at the same time, so I included a hidden VR player to run the audio file (thus losing audio tracking). Overall though, the full-screen experience is a decent approximation of the Daydream headset.

The image under Backyard was a test using a spherical panorama image, taken with my phone's camera app using the Photo Sphere option, and stitched together using the Cardboard Camera Toolkit. This utility also did a better job of extracting MP4 audio than the Google utility above which failed to extract audio on two of the Tahkenitch photos. I actually like the photo quality of the Photo Sphere image better, not sure yet if that was just dumb luck, and I'll have to experiment more with that in the future.