Making 360 videos for YouTube

Thanks to input from Chris Russell, splash has the ability to output images and videos that can be played as ‘360’ videos in YouTube, where the user can move around in 3D. Try moving around in the video below (made with splash!). Here the viewer is at the Galactic Centre while the simulation models the surrounding stars and their winds.

Quickstart on 360 videos

You can create a 360 video in splash as follows:

splash disc_0* -360 --movie

Or with more control by first making an interactive plot and editing settings:

splash disc_0* -360

For example, you can delete the colour bar by hovering over it and pressing backspace. Once happy, press ‘s’ from the window followed by ‘s’ from the text menu to save settings. Then save as an mpeg video by answering “movie.mp4” at the device prompt.

You might also get pleasing results by moving the viewer using the –origin flag, e.g.:

splash disc_0* -360 --movie --origin=100,100,100

Finally upload your mp4 to YouTube and tick the box indicating that it is a 360 video.

Longer explanation on 360 videos

The basic functionality of the -360 flag is to change the coordinate system to spherical coordinates centred on the origin, and then render column density in a theta-phi view, i.e. showing the column density along radial lines of sight projected to the origin. SPLASH also sets the aspect ratio correctly as required for the YouTube 360 format.

Yes we know 360 degrees is not the right term for an all sky view

Pedantically, it should be “4 pi steradians”, especially if you ask the astronomers. Hence, to keep the astronomers happy, “-fourpi” or “-4pi” is also accepted as a flag instead of “-360”