Enable 180°-360° metadata detection and embed/navigate capabilities in Commons/MediaViewer
Problem: When uploading, Commons can't detect metadata appropriately for the 180°–360° JPEG photos. That’s why we're getting fewer educational 180°-360° panoramas on Commons and fewer Facebook 360°-like photos in articles.
Proposed solution: 1. whitelist (.jps, .mpo). Allow these 2 JPEG-based formats to be uploaded and stored in Commons. 2. Just like animated GIFs, when uploading to Commons, all ‘JPEG’ 180°–360° (assume all 180°+ as 360° automatically) metadata should be detected. They should be extracted with the JPEGMetadataExtractor class and stored in a metadata field (just like Facebook 360). 3. Next, enable Commons/MediaViewer to handle, embed, and navigate 180°–360° photos.
Who would benefit: The editor who wants to express their feelings about the surroundings of any place or internal architecture in that article. Instead of showing multiple photos, editors can now show a single 360° photo that contains all of the information they want to show. Readers who like an interactive experience want to feel the surroundings of any place or its internal architecture in any Wiki article they read. It puts the reader or viewer in control of what they want to look at within an image, which is like being in the moment when that particular photograph was captured! They can spin around, look up or down, zoom in, and control where to look—all from their smartphone. All the 2022 released smartphone default camera has a ‘panorama’ option. So, now we can get a huge amount of Commons- and Wikipedia-appropriate educational 180°/360° photos if we implement this community wish.
More comments: The capability to perform metadata injection manually would be nice. To keep this proposal simple, we shouldn’t mix it with any three-dimensional computer graphics, model objects, stereoscopy, VR, or AR content viewing proposals. This has been a wish on the previous wishlists and only slightly missed the Top 10 thrice. Proposed in 2016, 2019 surveys by MASUM THE GREAT, ranking at #15, #13 and 2017 by TheDJ ranked #11.
I have actually done some work on this since last year. The metadata parsing part of it is done (and merged in core), it only needs to be fed to the generated HTML and then an extensions needs to add the appropriate JS to initiate the view when you click it. The exact latest state is captured in my Dutch Wikimedia Hackathon summary. I'm now 2 hackathons into this project. Thats however also the only time i've spent on it this year. Progress is slow since I generally just don't have a random 2+ hours available to spend on this project. But it should be pretty easy to complete with some dedicated attention. Especially the 360 and stereo views are achievable. Panoramas are actually turning out to be a bit more complex than I had thought, and possibly are better off to be left out in an initial version. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:37, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support As someone looking to potentially upload 180/360 content, it would be great to see this implemented fully. Also, the "support" button is broken in Firefox, I had to vote manually... —Locke Cole • t • c18:50, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support As one of the more active 360 photosphere photographers in the movement, yes please! Long overdue, and TheDJ has done great work in this area already and is ready to go with this feature. Fuzheado (talk) 11:15, 14 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support The amount of files is increasing, and these media are important for the future. Handling has to get better now ! I upload only some images because of additional work DrTrumpet (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]