Panoshooter in a nutshell
The Panoshooter macro from Dean Zwikel can be used to automate touch inputs on Android phones with the Insta360 app connected to the Insta360 Luna Ultra*. By moving the motorized gimbal, Panoshooter takes 24 photos which can be stitched together in PTGui into a 360° panorama. This increases the maximum panorama resolution from 8K with the Luna Ultra’s built-in method to 28K, making it more future-proof for upcoming headsets. Beyond VR, this also makes the Luna Ultra an interesting lightweight and relatively affordable option for creating high-resolution virtual tours compared with traditional setups using a camera, lens and an automated panorama head.
Luna Ultra + Panoshooter for taking 360° panoramas is suitable for you if…
- you have or are planning to get the Insta360 Luna Ultra camera and are willing to use PTGui or alternative stitching tools
- you want extremely high-quality 360° panoramas for VR, virtual tours or other applications
Luna Ultra + Panoshooter for taking 360° panoramas is less suitable for you if…
- you need to shoot dynamic scenes: as this method captures multiple images sequentially, moving objects might appear misaligned or duplicated
- you need a fast method of just pressing a button and getting your panorama
- you do not want to use a tripod
- you want to capture 360° videos
360° on Insta360 Luna Ultra
The popularity of gimbal cameras is increasing. DJI has been active in that area with its DJI Osmo series. While the Osmo cameras do support capturing a 180° panorama through gimbal movements, the current DJI series lacks the capability of capturing 360° content without physically moving the camera as the allowed gimbal rotations are limited.
Insta360 is known for pioneering various monoscopic and stereoscopic 360° cameras. The most popular ones, e.g. Insta360 X6*, use two approximately 190° fisheye lenses, one on each side. A single shutter press captures images from both sensors at the same time. The two 190° fisheye images are stitched together either in the smartphone app or on a desktop PC in the Insta360 Studio app. This approach is great to easily capture dynamic content. However, it is limited to the two sensors taking the two pictures of the final 360° media. In comparison to that, taking multiple high-res images and stitching them has the advantage of creating a much more detailed panorama. However, this is at the cost of losing support for capturing dynamic scenes as objects move around between different images taken.
Even if the final exported panorama, stitched from multiple high-res images, is later downscaled to 8000 × 4000 pixels as in the case of the built-in Insta360 Luna Ultra pano mode, it shows more clarity and detail than many of the other 360° cameras, despite high-megapixel counts such as 120 megapixels (15520 × 7760). It is often not discussed that output resolution alone does not determine actual image detail. With a conventional Bayer sensor, the full RGB value of each output pixel is reconstructed from neighboring sensor samples through demosaicing. Lens quality, sensor resolution, image processing, sharpening and stitching can therefore have a major impact on the amount of real detail in the final image. By capturing different parts of the scene with multiple high-resolution images and then downsampling the stitched result, the final panorama can retain more fine detail and produce cleaner sampling. Fine detail from the higher-resolution source images contributes to a cleaner and more detailed result after downsampling.
Insta360 Luna Ultra pano mode vs. Panoshooter
The built-in pano mode for 360° photos captures the multiple images quite quickly. It takes about 20 – 25 seconds to capture the full environment. Because the capture is relatively fast, scenes with slow-moving subjects, e.g., a pedestrian walking in the distance, can sometimes work perfectly well without ghosting or duplicated objects. The final image is directly stitched on the camera at 8000 × 4000 pixels as an equirectangular 360° panorama.
As described above, that quality is already very good due to the higher-res input images. However, more is possible and to remain future-proof for current and upcoming higher-resolution VR headsets, it is very reasonable to want the same hardware to be able to capture in even better quality.
This is where the Panoshooter macro comes in!
Panoshooter macro for Android devices
The macro from Dean Zwikel automates precise gimbal positioning and capture steps that would not be practical to perform manually. Using the virtual joystick in the Insta360 smartphone app, it rotates the camera on the gimbal and takes enough photos in all directions so a proper 360° panorama can be created from them. To do this all easily and automatically, the tool MacroDroid is used. It is an app with elevated permissions that can automatically perform touch and drag gestures from macros on Android devices. MacroDroid is free, but after seven days of usage, either watching ads is required to continue using it or a one-time payment of 6.99€ can be made. I highly recommend the latter to save time and nerves, and to support the developer of MacroDroid.
As a next step, the free Panoshooter macro from Dean Zwikel needs to be downloaded. You can get access and support for it in the Panoshooter Google Group.
As there can be small unit-to-unit differences between Luna Ultra cameras, including slight differences in gimbal motor speed, and performance can also differ between Android phones, calibration is required for each setup. Therefore, the first step is to use the calibration scripts from Panoshooter. During calibration, the pixel position of the virtual joystick’s center in the app needs to be set first. You can measure that yourself on a screenshot of the Insta360 app connected to the Luna Ultra. Several popular phones have been tested with it already, so there might already be a value in the public download. After that, you have to run various tests using the Panoshooter scripts and use two printouts to check how many degrees the gimbal moved to fine-tune the calibration.
After that is done, you can go out and take your first test shots. I would recommend doing that first for testing and not yet for an important shoot. If you do indoor test shots, it is important to note that white walls and white ceilings can make the final images harder to stitch together. In my case, when I did test shots as a beta tester of Panoshooter, I got better test results from my balcony compared to indoor shots.
When the capture is done, you can copy the images to your PC. You will need to have the panorama tool PTGui installed. There is a free trial version of it. However, for use without watermarks, a paid license is required, e.g. the PTGui 13 standard personal license for currently 175€ + VAT. The Pro version is not required for what we want to do. For PTGui, Panoshooter includes an XML file which helps PTGui align the captured images for better stitching. A preview with labeled image numbers shows the expected equirectangular output. If any areas are marked gray, except the bottom area, then the calibration might not have been ideal and should be revisited.
Finally, you can press “Create panorama” in PTGui to export. The maximum resolution is 27654 × 13827 pixels. Lower-res versions can easily be created by changing the 100% value in the tool to e.g. 50% for output with 13826 × 6913 pixels.
Results
First, we have a look at a crop of an equirectangular panorama shot on the Insta360 ONE RS 1-Inch 360 Edition, which was one of the most highly recommended professional monoscopic 360° cameras in 2022. We compare that to the built-in automatic panorama capture of the Luna Ultra and to the result of using Panoshooter on Luna Ultra. For the Panoshooter comparisons below, we used fixed exposure and ISO, without manual image enhancement or stitching corrections. Panoshooter can also capture RAW (DNG) images, providing considerably more flexibility for post-processing than the built-in Luna Ultra pano mode, which outputs only the final JPG panorama.
In a second example, we compare the Luna Ultra’s automatic built-in 360° mode with the new Panoshooter macro.
Impact on Virtual Reality and Sample Download
How much of a difference does the increase from the Luna Ultra’s 8K pano mode to 28K with Panoshooter make on current VR headsets?
- On Quest 2 and Quest 3S, the limited display resolution does not make a significant difference
- On Quest 3, a small difference in sharpness and clarity can be observed, with fine patterns such as roof tiles no longer showing visible moiré.
- For the upcoming next Meta headset, codenamed Phoenix, with a rumored resolution of 2560 × 2560 pixels per eye (approximately 44% more pixels compared to Quest 3), the difference should be clearly noticeable
- For higher-res headsets such as Apple Vision Pro, HTC Vive Pro 2, various Varjo headsets and the upcoming PICO Space Pro, the visual difference can be significant
However, it is best to judge for yourself. Therefore, I packed up the comparison shots so you can either compare them on a 2D monitor or in your headset.
You can either manually download our Insta360 Luna Ultra panorama photo comparisons (256 MB) with Panoshooter or, in our VR media player app immerGallery for Quest, PICO and SteamVR, use the short download URL pano under Downloads, Custom URL, then press “Go!”. In immerGallery, you can enable Settings, Advanced, Keep yaw rotation between 360° and Settings, Experimental, Faster fading to switch between the images quickly while keeping your orientation in the panorama.
Practical tips
- At around 33°C ambient temperature, my camera overheated after roughly three full Panoshooter runs. In very warm conditions, consider short cooldown breaks.
- Offsetting the camera on a selfie-stick on the tripod helps reduce how much of the tripod legs appear in the panorama
Conclusion
The Panoshooter macro from Dean Zwikel greatly enhances what the Insta360 Luna Ultra can do and makes it one of the best cameras for high-resolution monoscopic 360° panoramas within its limitations: for a static scene and enough time for shooting (2 minutes 20 seconds vs. 25 seconds for built-in pano), it delivers excellent image quality at high resolution.
For current high-resolution VR headsets and new VR devices coming in the next few years, the increased resolution compared with the Luna Ultra’s built-in 8000 × 4000-pixel 360° panorama should be clearly noticeable. High-resolution virtual tours viewed on 2D displays can also benefit from the additional detail.
We are hoping that Insta360 is listening and impressed as well: it should not be too hard for them to add a mode in a future firmware update in which the individual images taken during the internal 360° pano mode are saved in their full resolution, allowing users to stitch these themselves in PTGui. While the auto pano mode is currently done in the standard, lower-resolution photo mode, it would also be easy to allow this for the higher-resolution UltraPhoto mode, which is also the preferred mode for Panoshooter. As Insta360’s own firmware can directly control the gimbal motors, coordinate their movement and confirm when a shot has been saved, the capture time would still be much faster than what can currently be done through the virtual joystick movements with safety margins to allow the gimbal movement and image capture to complete.
Outlook: In China, the Insta360 Luna Pro has already been released. It looks very similar to the Luna Ultra, except that it uses a single-camera design instead of a dual-camera design. Panoshooter is also likely to work on the Insta360 Luna Pro. If confirmed, we will of course report on it on immerNews.
Let us know what you think about Panoshooter and feel free to share your experience with it in the comments below.
Links
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Thank you very much for your thorough test and explanations. My experience has been very similar.
However, I believe Dean’s Panoshooter is particularly well suited to very large, highly detailed interiors, where the additional resolution makes a noticeable difference. In smaller rooms, the improvement over the Luna Ultra’s built-in panorama mode is less significant.
I have also created a comparison between Dean’s 28K panorama and a 50K panorama captured with a 50mm lens. Perhaps this will be of interest as well:
https://www.clever-click.ch/dom-arlesheim-50k-und-28k/