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Create Immersive 360° worlds on a shoestring budget

Want to build some in-situ online training but can’t afford to bring in the professionals? Mark Gash says it's time to channel your inner 80’s dad, roll up your sleeves and DIY.

360° world-building used to require special cameras and a team of code-monkeys to bring a virtual environment to lifeit wasn’t the cheapest venture around. If you’re looking for a highly polished end product, then I recommend you still go to the professionals (hit us up - we know people) but if quick and dirty is your thing, then all you need is some loose change from down the back of the sofa and a willingness to learn.

So crack those knuckles and ready your text prompts - we’re about to play God.

In this guide, we’re going to use some fairly inexpensive tools - Skybox, Photoshop and H5P - to craft 360° interactive educational space that will work on desktops, tablets and mobiles. If you’re looking to build an experience for a VR headset, your outlay will cost a bit more but I recommend you look at 3DVista as a tool. Now, for no other reason than I can see sheep out of the office window as I write this, I’m going to show you how to create an explorable countryside scene.

First up, we’re looking at Skybox from Blockade Labs. (https://skybox.blockadelabs.com) Skybox uses AI to allow users to create 3D 360 environments without coding, using text prompts.

Pricing starts from $12 a month for upto 100 prompt-generated scenes. There is a trial version but all the images you generate with the trial are watermarked, so no good for actual projects you want others to use.

I asked Skybox to create a “Yorkshire Dales landscape with fields, drystone walls, a barn, a river. Season is summer.” and this is what it generated:

The image above is the ‘unrolled’ image - the Skybox UI lets you scroll around and preview the 360° in situ. If you don’t like what it creates, you can roll the dice again with a new prompt or work with the environment it’s generated and tweak aspects using options in the Skybox UI, such as render style, weather and lighting.

I was fairly happy with mine, so I downloaded and dropped it into Adobe Photoshop to add in some specific elements using the newly integrated Firefly generative AI. Photoshop pricing starts at £21.98 a month for the standalone app, rising to £56.98 for the full Creative Cloud suite of products, including Illustrator, Indesign and Premiere.

Adobe’s Firefly AI has completely changed the Photoshop game in the last 18 months. Primarily another text-to-image prompt field, you simply select an area on an image and type in what you would like to appear.

Firefly has a pretty good hit rate at determining the style of your image to generate appropriate objects and match the lighting and shadow. It can even recognise an equirectangular image (the fancy name for the type of image that wraps around to create a 360 environment) which is no small feat - as you can see in the image above generated by Skybox, when you unroll an equirectangular, it has some weird angles and curves to it. If you’ve ever taken a photo with a 360 camera, then dropped it into Photoshop and tried to edit it, you’ll know what I mean, but Firefly makes short work of it.

Within a couple of minutes, I added a barn, cow, sheep, dog, and hot air balloon to my scene. They may not be the prettiest, and I could certainly improve on them by refining my prompts and using some old-school Photoshop skills, but I’m on a deadline, and a cow is a cow, right?

360 scene generated, and details in place, it’s time to make this into an interactive learning experience. My current goto for this would be the 3DVista software mentioned earlier, but it’s not the cheapest option, has a steep-ish learning curve and only outputs SCORM or standalone packages for headsets. So for this article, I’m going with H5P.

As we looked at last issue, H5P integrates well with a variety of LMS’ via LTI, such as Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard and Brightspace, so you can carry scoring directly into your backend reports.

You can try out H5P at h5p.org before installing it on your own LMS or you can buy a subscription on h5p.com (from

$79 per month), which is their premium environment for creating, sharing and reusing interactive content. Your creations are hosted there, so you can embed them on a website and don’t necessarily need an LMS (although this means you won’t get any reporting, they will just exist as in-the-moment activities).

Using H5P’s Virtual Tour 360 content type, I dropped in my edited image, which places it back into a 360 viewer, similar to how it was viewed in Skybox. From here, you can choose from a number of interactions to overlay onto the scene, including quizzes, audio, video and image files, together with pop-up info boxes and links to other scenes if you’re looking to expand your world and make it more explorable.

For the sake of this tutorial, I added 1 of each interaction. You have limited options to position or hide your labels and H5P.com subscriptions have enhanced features, such as altering colours and uploading your own icons, however, in the above example, these are all stock.

Once you’re finished, save your project - if you’re working on a version of H5P on your LMS, you’re ready to go. If you’ve been working in H5P.com, then either export the file to upload to your LMS, or embed the link on your webpage.

Check out my finished demo here for the full 360° experience, then go forth and create your own worlds!

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