WE USE A Ricoh Theta S #ricoh360 camera in every academic course I teach on the Clonmel Digital Campus and I’m impressed at how its use improves the critical visual skills of students. There is so much more in an image when you can spin a photo up, down, and around.
The Ricoh Theta S is a pocket camera that I use with an app on my Android or iPhone. I like the Android’s app better because I’ve set up everything to snap quickly then to transfer the image directly to the phone from the camera. That lets me upload the image directly to Facebook as a 360 image, using the Facebook app to set the starting point of the image. From snap to transfer to upload to viewing on Facebook normally takes me three minutes. I leave a caption with the image on Facebook as well as on Flickr where I have a dedicated 360 album.
I need to carve out a separate hour in one of my design studios for students to analyse 360 work so I can bring the academic perspective of volumetric imagery to both our creative media and digital animation curricula. I also want to show local primary school students how to create a 360 stage in their mind before they snap and share images from the Ricoh Theta S camera.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business in the Limerick Institute of Technology.]
