My newest experiment is a question I’ve asked on Quora: What is the best name for a 360-degree spherical interactive panoramic photo? Let’s see if we can together influence people and facilitate defining the industry-standard way of describing 360-degree photos presented interactively with the possibility to look 360-degrees around and up and down.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about just yet, take a look at the the images on the homepage of 360 cities(for example). However, this call for help is about the sphere panoramas in general, not about a specific site or company. This is an appeal to all panoramic photographers and people in the industry. Let’s define a new industry-standard way of naming what we create, facilitate creating or use and let’s unify our efforts in bringing and promoting this new name to our clients, partners, mainstream users, twitter followers and friends. Let’s collaboratively write that name on a flag, pick it all up and carry it to our viewers. Am I naive? May be, but it’s definitely worth trying. Why is this important?

• There are currently too many ways explaining the same thing
• We already have a hard time explaining the concept to people, we need to find one term and explain it the best way we can, instead of confusing our audiences with many words for the same thing
• When explaining the concept to your listeners, the chances are your they already know the concept, at least vaguely they have an idea, however you fail to deliver your point to them because you use a different term

I had enough of the struggling whenever I want to write about »IT«, and by it, I could mean:

• Spherical panorama
• 360-degree photo
• Interactive panorama
• Immersive photo / panorama / tour
• Virtual reality photo
• Virtual reality tour
• Virtual tour
• Spherical photo
• Sphere photo
• Sphere panorama
• VR photo / panorama / tour
• Streetview-like imagery
• Spin panorama
• 360 photo / panorama
• Interactive panoramic image
• etc.

This is insane. Even I myself used about there or four different terms in this article and we are very inconsistent on the 360 cities website as well. We all need to start over and define a proper name, once for all. Whether you are an SEO expert, panoramic photographer, virtual tour creator, VR photographer, interactive pano producer, or panoramic equipment manufacturer, stitching software provider or some kind of related service creator, whether you are an individual or a corporation, an amateur or a pro, this appeal goes to you. Let’s get together and cooperatively define what the name of our industry should be. The time has come to clear all confusion and come up with a term that consists of one, two or more simple words that clearly identify our hobby, business, passion and life. It needs to be clear, simple and acceptable for everybody. Whatever you are using now, let’s put our personal prides aside for a while and let’s co-invent something that will help us all to be understood better.

To participate, visit the question on Quora:

http://qr.ae/byqh

Once there feel free to

- Edit my question if you come up with a better wording

- Post your proposals

- You can also upvote and downvote peoples’ answers and to comment on them.

Important: As Scott Young likes to say, this article doesn’t have legs so it can’t travel on its own. Please share it with your friends to spread the word. Feel free to share the question on Quora directly if you want. Thanks in advance for your help. Only together we can succeed! - Jan