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You’re looking at 360 panoramas. They could be also be called 360° panoramas, 360-degree panoramas, omniviews, VR photos, virtual reality panoramas, sphere panoramas, etc. but we call them «360 panoramas» or simply «panos» here on 360Cities.

Panoramic photography of some kind has existed for more than a century. You can see many examples of 360 degree photos from 100 years ago. Nowadays you can see a boom in this kind of visualization technology due to the ever-reducing cost of the technology, availability of software, abundance of publishing tools. One of the most important aspects is also that the broadband internet made it possible to easily share this kind of photography with others. 360 Panoramas are the new way of showing places, events and businesses on the internet. 

In terms of the format of panoramas, there are essentially three different kinds:

• Partial panoramas that you know mainly from traditional landscape photography. They are created by stitching (assembling) of multiple normal photos together side-by-side, which creates a photo with much wider angle that would be possible with a normal lens.
  360Cities does not support partial panoramas.
• Cylindrical 360º panoramas – One notch higher are 360° photos which capture the whole field of view in all directions around the photographer. These are sometimes called cylindrical panoramas. They cover 360-degrees around but not up and down view. These are too created by stitching multiple photos together. The only real difference from partial panoramas is that you need to make sure the first and the last photos overlap. There are also so called «one shot» 360-degree lenses but they are by definition very low quality compared to the traditional stitched panoramas.
  
• Spherical panoramas are the top of the line which not only capture the 360-degree field of view but in which you can also look up and down. They can even be taken in a way that you can’t see the tripod nor the photographer’s shadow in the picture. 
  

360Cities supports cylindrical and spherical panoramas. See also Requirements for Panoramas Published on 360Cities.

The secret of creating 360 panoramas

So, what is the secret of creating a 360 panorama? It’s actually pretty easy. You, the photographer, choose a place from which you want the panorama to be taken. Then you start taking photos around yourself until you cover the whole intended field of view with photos. It does not really matter what camera or lens you use, you can even use a cell phone, as long as the photos overlap. The easiest, though, is to use a digital SLR camera with a fisheye lens. The wider the viewing angle of the lens is, the less photos you need to cover the entire field of view. With a cell phone, you will need many photos, with a fisheye lens, you need as little as three to cover the entire sphere.

Take a look at the view that shows how to take fully spherical 360 panoramas without the visible tripod:

PanoTools Wiki – information hub for panoramic photography
Panorama Tutorials – more links