Found out about this (via a local news site) earlier, a product called MakingView. Their tagline:
Explore our unique and Award Winning 360° technologies, and the opportunities we offer in visual excellence.
Their pitch is that you can get the “real” experience. Pretty cool idea, so I thought I’d quickly take a look at how it works. First up, fire up a browser, grab the URLs.
Video: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/medium.f4v
Player: http://360content.redbull.com/2012/lofoten/makingviewer.swf
Fire up VLC, and see the following (edit: apologies, it seems something somewhere is a bit screwed with the width of the content blocks, just open the pics in a new tab):
In the boat
Boardwalk
Next step: become disappointed that there isn’t really anything cool going on. Video is just a very long series of (admittedly probably well-tweaked) panoramic pictures, and the player maps that to a globe and points shows you wherever you’re watching. Sadpant.
Edit: to anyone wondering why I wrote this, I was really hoping there were some cool multi-stream video hax going on, but ended up not. And yup, first time I saw a thing like this.