I'd be really grateful for any advice on this work related problem please: I have a project at work where CAD plans are due to be produced to show the different rooms in various buildings. Each room will have a 360 degree photograph taken. The photos will either be embedded within a pdf of the plan or as a hyperlink in the plan to a location where they are going to kept e.g. on the client's server.

The problem is the ability to then view the photos in 360 mode. My (limited) understanding is the photos are really 2D jpegs but with some clever metadata that tells the viewer software to wrap the photo around as if you are looking from the inside of a sphere outwards and can scroll using a mouse or trackpad up/down/left/right. I'm not looking to have the ability to link the photos so you can walk through the building, only to view each photo separately as a 360 photo.

I'm struggling to get any sensible advice, help or engagement from the IT team. There's nothing on the IT system currently installed to view anything other than 2D photos. It's unlkely that security restrictions are going to allow a web-hosted solution such as google photos or similar that involves uploading them outside the organisation.

Is there anything that is relatively simple, ideally free that would be a potential piece of software that could do this (that the IT dept. might be prepared to consider). I have found MS 360 viewer for Edge which sounds like it might do this, but all I can find on the internet researching it is in relation to VR headsets, which isn't going to be any good. The client will only be using pc.s and laptops to view the plans and photos.

I've come up against the limit of my knowledge and a thoroughly unhelpful IT (crowd) dept.

Is this of any help?

https://www.vlchelp.com/play-360-videos-photos/

Thanks and I think the problem is going to be the fact that the company's IT dept. as so reluctant to install programmes without hideously expensive and protracted testing...

Can't you just upload them to google photos?

That's one work-around, but it's a bit clunky. The client doesn't want it web-hosted (for security reasons), but finding some software that they trust is proving an problem. What they want to do it just click on an embedded link in a plan that points to their server and have the 360 jpeg launch as it would do for a standard jpeg. I think until their IT team catch up with reality they are going to be stuck as webhosted solutions seem to be the only way. Maybe providing some sort of assurance around security of keeping photos on the web is the most solution here. Thanks for your suggests though.