Allows Users to Autonomously Capture and Stitch 360 Photos With A DJI Drone

Hangar has introduced a new app it is calling a "piece of Hangar’s vision for the future, a proof-of-concept for end-to-end autonomous data capture, processing, and delivery."

Hangar 360 is a free app for drone users that allows operators to easily create and share interactive 360 degree photos for use on mobile or desktop, the company says in a post on its website.

Hangar 360 autonomously flies your DJI drone, captures the required aerial images, allows for one-touch upload to the Hangar cloud for processing, and delivers a fully-stitched 360 image link back to you. 

Hangar 360 is compatible with the DJI Phantom 3 (Standard, 4k, Advanced, Pro), Phantom 4, Phantom 4 Pro, Inspire 1, Inspire 2 and Mavic Pro. Best of all it’s completely free. 

After performing a pre-flight safety check and initializing the app, the drone will autonomously take off to 300ft to shoot the photos necessary for a 360 photo. After the drone has been landed safely, Hangar 360 can send the captured images to Hangar for processing. In less than an hour, Hangar 360 will create your 360 photo and host it online for free.

Panoramic 360 photos that are interactive on mobile devices and can be navigated in VR hardware have grown increasingly popular with drone users, with a multitude of apps and features available for users to capture the imagery necessary to produce them. However, the prohibitive step for many users is that these images must be carefully stitched and edited, which requires complicated or expensive software, and is not readily accessible for most drone users, according to the company.

The app is available for free from the Apple store. The company says it is offering the app free of charge in order to test and build its systems to scale. "Our user base of over 30k Autopilot users in over 190 countries has pushed us to consistently work to out-do ourselves with features for autonomous mission planning, and integration with the DJI SDK," said Hangar vice president and aerial photographer Oren Schauble in the post. "With Hangar 360, we’re working on cloud processing, at a giant scale as all 360 photos are processed in the Hangar cloud, within minutes. We get to test our systems at scale and build infrastructure we’ll use across our business, and in return we get to offer an interesting creative product for all of the drone users that have supported us through our many iterations of ground control software."

(Image from Hangar 360 introduction video posted to YouTube)

FMI: http://hangar.com