Author all media, such as panoramas and movies, at the highest-possible resolution and quality so they can be resampled to different resolutions in the future.

This topic entails many caveats and tradeoffs.

Use 4096x2048 equirectangular projection panoramas for both games and 360 photos. 1024x1024 cubemaps are for games, and 1536x1536 cubemaps are for viewing in 360 Photos with the overlay code.

The Qualcomm H.264 video decoder’s spec was designed with the ability to decode 4k video at 30 FPS, but it has significant headroom above that. The pixel rate can be flexibly divided between resolution and frame rate, so you can, for example, play a 3840x1920 video at 30 FPS or a 1920x1920 video at 60 FPS.

Note that although Android has a resolution limit of 4096x4096, it’s recommended that you stay below that. For stereoscopic resolution, the resolution would be 2560x2560 at 30 FPC or 1920x1920 at 60 FPS. More recent phones can go above these resolutions.

Oculus 360 Video is implemented using equirectangular mapping to render panoramic videos. Top-bottom, bottom-top, left-right, and right-left stereoscopic video support is implemented using the following naming convention for videos:

Comfortable viewing size for a screen is usually less than 70 degrees of horizontal field of view, which allows the full screen to be viewed without turning your head significantly. For video playing on a surface in a virtual world using the recommended 1024x1024 eye buffers, anything over 720x480 DVD resolution is wasted, and if you don’t explicitly build mipmaps for it, it will alias and look worse than a lower resolution video.

With the TimeWarp overlay plane code running in Oculus Cinema on the 1440 devices, 1280x720 HD resolution is a decent choice. The precise optimum depends on seating position and may be a bit lower, but everyone understands 720P, so it is probably best to stick with that. Use more bit rate than a typical web stream at that resolution, as the pixels will be magnified so much. The optimal bit rate is content dependent, and many videos can get by with less, but 5 Mb/s should give good quality.

1080P movies play, but the additional resolution is wasted and power consumption is needlessly increased.

3D movies should be encoded “full side by side” with a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio. Content mastered at 1920x1080 compressed side-by-side 3D should be resampled to 1920x540 resolution full side-by-side resolution.

When loading a movie from the sdcard, Oculus Cinema looks for a sidecar file with metadata. The sidecar file is simply a UTF8 text file with the same filename as the movie, but with the extension .txt. It contains the title, format (2D/3D), and category.

{
"title":        "Introducing Henry",
"format":        "2D",
"category":    "trailers",
"theater":     ""
}

Title is the name of the movie. Oculus Cinema will use this value instead of the filename to display the movie title.

Format describes how the film is formatted. If left blank, it will default to 2D (unless the movie has ‘3D’ in its pathname). Format may be one of the following values:

Category can be one of the following values:

The retail version of 360 Photos stores all its media attribution information in a meta file that is packaged into the apk. This allows the categories to be dynamically created and/or altered without the need to modify the media contents directly. For the SDK 360 Photos, the meta file is generated automatically using the contents found in Oculus/360Photos.

The metadata has the following structure in a meta.json file which is read in from the assets folder:

{
    "Categories":[
        {
          "name" : "Category1"
        },
        {
          "name" : "Category2"
        }
],
"Data":[
{
    "title":     "Media title",
    "author":    "Media author",
    "url":       "relative/path/to/media"
    "tags" : [
{ "category" : "Category2" }
]
}
{
    "title":     "Media title 2",
    "author":    "Media author 2",
    "url":       "relative/path/to/media2"
    "tags" : [
{ "category" : "Category" },
    { "category" : "Category2" }
]
}
}

For both the retail and SDK versions of 360 Videos, the meta data structure is not used and instead the categories are generated based on what’s read in from the media found in Oculus/360Videos.

The SDK comes with three applications for viewing stills and movies. The Oculus Cinema application can play both regular 2D movies and 3D movies. The Oculus 360 Photos application can display 360 degree panoramic stills and the Oculus 360 Videos application can display 360 degree panoramic videos. These applications have the ability to automatically search for media in specific folders on the device. Oculus 360 Photos uses metadata which contains the organization of the photos it loads in addition to allowing the data to be dynamically tagged and saved out to its persistent cache. This is how the “Favorite” feature works, allowing the user to mark photos as favorites without any change to the media storage itself. The following table indicates where to place additional media for these applications.