Introduction
  Paul "Footleg" Fretwell's 360° photos are a magnificent record of some of our underground highlights and entrances taken a few years ago. These were taken using an SLR camera, great care with camera angles and lighting, and hours of stitching the many digital photos together and correcting aberrations and poor overlap. See, for example, the Astradome and the VR tour in Hoyos. These are displayed from a site hosting a paid-for viewer.
    Technology, as is often the case, has now provided a much simpler method of obtaining a similar result with one camera 'click'. (It must be said that the result is much poorer quality - one digital file instead of dozens stitched together.)
    However, as another method of recording and documenting caving finds and locations, there is a lot to recommend it.

360° photos
   Starting in the summer 2022, a number of 360° photos have been taken of cave entrances. There are various, 2 lens devices that are capable of taking this view: the device used here is a GoPro Max. The great advantage of a 360° photo is that the entrance is shown in context - the complete surroundings.
   A few shots have also been taken underground but these require some thought and, possibly, extensive lighting!
   All the 360° photos have been named as nnnn-360-mmm-2022s-01 etc etc so that a search using -360- will find them.
   No browser appears to incorporate a 360° photo viewer so, to view (rotate and zoom in and out) a 360° photo, a special viewer app is required. Facebook will show such photos but best results are found with the Ricoh Theta app, the Insta360 PLAYER and, possibly even better, the VLC Media Player. Other viewers may be available.
    Most photos have been reduced in size from 13Mb down to 2.5Mb and appear to loose little quality.
• Each 360° file will need to be downloaded then dragged into the viewer.
The VLC app should be paused when viewing a photo.
   (Some example files: 0017 4732
   Sometimes, a screen shot is taken of a portion of the 360° photo (or video). This can be viewed as a plain jpg file.

360° videos
   The same GoPro Max device will record 360° videos. These clips can be used in a number of ways.
• It is likely that most video will have portions of the 360° view selected (reframed) then edited into a standard video file.
• Some 360° files will be uploaded to YouTube where they can be viewed, zoomed and rotated. Viewing on a device with Android appears to require a spinning office chair or a two-finger swipe to rotate the picture. Zooming in or out on Android is not possible? Downloading from YouTube appears to be a paid-for facility.
(Examples on YouTube: site 1460, 3302 1 and 2)
• Some 360° videos can be downloaded, although at about 0.5Gb for each minute there won't be many of those. They can be viewed using the VLC Media Player (rotated and zoomed in and out).

JSC 22/9/2022