A fusing of the very 1st Gear360 video was quite accurate, all the way to the bottom. This had the camera horizontal.
A fusing of the camera rotated sideways was also nearly perfect, all the way to the bottom.
The leading theory is grinding the lens down may have tilted the plane of focus so objects on 1 side are farther away than objects on the other side. This can probably be corrected with a pile of new parameters.
Another problem was vignetting causing the boundaries to look dark.
Eliminated the radius parameter from the Bourke equations, since it only scaled the field of view. Fusing now took only field of view, input XY, & Z rotation.
Uploading it to the goo tube requires tagging it. The goog has source code for tagging it & reading the tags. It's a python program which works on all operating systems. Merely run 'python spatialmedia -h' in the root directory.
https://github.com/google/spatial-media/releases
Unfortunately, it couldn't handle files containing mp4 audio. Despite being written 16 years after libraries for reading Quicktime/mp4 started appearing, he still wrote a custom parser which doesn't work. Such is life in a world with every program written in a different language.
The decision was made to hack the lion kingdom's 19 year old make_streamable program to inject the header while also moving the headers to the start of the file. It'll never pass a Goog job screening, but it works. It was hard coded for equirectangular with 2 channel audio. The hardware is around for making 4 channel audio, but the standards are very complex.
It has some potential on the day job's ipad pro. It's almost worth buying VR goggles to experience that moment again. The Samsung's inability to resolve the moon was a disaster.
To get flickr & facebook to show spherical photos in a viewer, use exiftool to add the magic tag.
exiftool -ProjectionType="equirectangular" photo.jpg