How to turn a 360 video into a tiny planet

Now that I had grasped the fundamentals of how tiny planets are created, I wanted to re-encode any Vimeo 360 video as a tiny planet — and I gave myself single restriction: to auto-generate a tiny planet with just a link to a Vimeo video. Why? It’s a huge time suck to download every 360 video and load them one-by-one, into something like GoPro’s VR Premiere plugin to preview. The only way I could think to do something like that easily is to leverage Unity and the Vimeo Unity SDK. Unity is best known as a game development platform, but as I have started to dive deep into the platform, it’s capable of so much more. Unity’s flexibility, combined with the fact that Unity is 100% free for beginners, students, and hobbyists, I realized that this is the perfect opportunity to transform a game platform into a video importer, encoder, and exporter — or put more simply, I turned it into a Tiny Planet generator. In just a few steps, you can convert all your 360 videos into tiny planets. Before we begin, a couple of notes:

Make sure you have downloaded and installed Unity.
This tutorial assumes your 360 videos are already uploaded to Vimeo and that you have a Vimeo Pro or higher subscription. If you have any questions about the upload process, check out the uploading guide.

1. Open Unity

Once it’s open, you’ll be asked to create a new project. Call it Tiny Planet, use the 3D template, and click Create project.

2. Playing a 360 video inside Unity

There are a couple ways of playing video in Unity: you can either import the video into your Unity project or stream it straight from Vimeo. Since my 360 videos are already on Vimeo, I leveraged the Vimeo Unity SDK. Per the installation instructions, download the .unitypackage file, open it up, and import it into your blank Unity scene. In the left-hand hierarchy panel, right-click an empty space and select Video > Vimeo Player (360). This will import a 360-ready sphere into your scene.

Casey Pugh