To do it in PlayCanvas I simply created a massive sphere and mapped the texture to the inside of the sphere and then noticed a massive issue. The columns of the building looked completely distorted and it didn’t matter how big I made the sphere it didn’t have any impact. So I referred back to my aFrame version and there was no distortion at all.
Now I know you are going to say I can create cubemaps which work better but that’s not the point, I should be able to create a photosphere. I am wondering that since there isn’t any controls over the geometry of the sphere primitive in PlayCanvas if that is the issue. Is there any way to alter the geometry of the sphere primitive so I can get rid of the distortion?
That may be done to the number of polygons that make up the built in primitive sphere. We should expose a property to let you change the detail level of the sphere, but currently we don’t.
If you have access to something like Blender. Try exporting a “UV Sphere” and applying your texture to that instead.
I would rather something this simple could be done in playcanvas without resorting to blender so your idea of exposing the properties of the sphere sounds like a great idea, or even someway of programmatically altering the geometry would be good. That way a script called photosphere could simply be added to the sphere primitive.
Just tested the blender idea and it does work, so it’s definitely a geometry issue. The blender solution isn’t very ideal because it uses up quite a bit of storage space when you are importing in models. Much better as an option on the sphere primitive. You could even go further and create a sky primitive in addition to the cubemap so people had a choice of either.