Viewing panoramas on a VR headset is not as trivial as it seems.

There are many different factors that need to be considered when viewing panoramas, like resolution of the headset display, resolution of the panorama, type of the panorama (e.g. mono or stereo) and the angle of the panorama image itself. Most professional panoramas include 360° full spherical coverage, but not all. Panorama images made with the iPhone do not cover 360°, but maximum 270° since the panorama photo option does not allow taking full spherical panoramas.

Also, depending on which lens you´re using when taking a panorama with the iPhone, the height of the panorama differs.

Panorama & Headset Display Resolution

Achieving the best visual quality when viewing panoramas on a VR headset requires knowledge of the headset technical specifications. A full spherical 360° panorama will always be displayed only with a portion of the full image since the headset can only display the maximum FOV (field of view) that it supports. Of course you can rotate your head, but the part you´re seeing will never be wider than the FOV of your headset.

The Apple Vision Pro has a maximum horizontal FOV of 100° while the Meta Quest 3 has a FOV of 110°.

Now, let´s consider the resolution of the displays of each headset. The Apple Vision Pro has a resolution of 3.660 x 3.200 pixel per eye while the Meta Quest has 2.064 x 2.208 pixel per eye. Not considering any additional antialiasing, the maximum horizontal resolution of a panorama image for best sharpness would be

• 13.176 pixel on a Vision Pro (3.660 pixel x 3,6)
• 6.750 pixel on a Meta Quest (2.064 pixel x 3.27)

Higher resolutions might improve image quality depending on how these images are being viewed and how the viewer is dealing with antialiasing, but much higher resolutions (e.g. 30.000 pixel) would only increase loading times, but not improve image quality any further.

In the future we might see headsets with even higher resolution (60 ppd = 60 pixel per degree) and in that case it may be necessary to increase panorama resolution, but until then we can stick with the best compromise of panoramas between 10.000 – 15.000 pixel horizontal resolution.