The Unofficial Guide for RICOH THETA is a free and open collection of resources for users of the world’s best-selling, low-cost 360 degree camera. Developers from around the world have grabbed the camera and built cool solutions including projects around live streaming, time-lapse photography, telepresence and lots more. Are you working on something? We’d love to hear about it.

The RICOH THETA comes with an open source API based on Google’s Open Spherical Camera (OSC) API. This means the camera can be accessed and manipulated remotely. Many companies and individual developers are building applications and services utilizing 360 images and video in a wide range of areas from entertainment, security, real estate and construction, car sales, travel and more.

GitHub repos are especially useful. You fork it, change it some — or none — and you’ve got working code. It can be incredibly useful for getting started.

The Top 4 new GitHub repos for RICOH THETA are listed on the main page of the THETA Developers Unofficial Community page on GitHub. There are currently 50 repos listed on GitHub, and many more cool projects and ideas on the Unofficial Guide.

Pairing RICOH THETA with Raspberry Pi to Build Time-Lapse Solution

tlapser360 developer Jason Charcalla explains, “This is a proof of concept script I wrote to run on a raspberry pi with a Ricoh Theta S camera. I initially wrote this as an attempt to get my Theta S camera to shoot stills faster than using the built in intervalometer. In testing I was able to shave about 2 seconds from the shooting time, This however only seems to work using WIFI and not the USB. It also supports geotagging with gpsd and camera metering via an adafruit LUX meter. Metering features are still a work in progress and require a familiarity with the Raspberry pi GPIO interface. With metering enabled you can force the exposure to ramp in a single direction, this is useful for things like sunrise and sunset.”

Live Ricoh Theta S Dual Fish Eye for SteamVR in Unity

unity-steamvr-demo developer Megan Zimmerman says, “I’ve been working on a system for robotic control using the HTC Vive for a few months now. Part of this system involved live streaming 360 feed into a virtual reality headset, which was easier said than done. There are a lot of instructions/tutorials/guides out there but nothing that completely does what I wanted to do, so I figured I would write this up for anybody who wanted to do something similar using SteamVR or other VR API’s in Unity.”

Full tutorial and code available here.

Studying Climate Change with RICOH THETA Time-Lapse

Photosphere developer Koen Hufkens states, “The photosphere project combines a Rico Theta S and a raspberry pi with a custom outdoor housing into a rugged 360 (outdoor) time-lapse camera. In my application I track changes in leaf development in a North-Eastern US forest. You can visit the project website at http://virtualforest.io. However, other applications are possible (hints on how to do nighttime images through the USB API are welcome).”

Adding “Cardboard” functionality, Mobile Fullscreen and (OpenTok) WebRTC <video> Element Overrides

THETA_GL pull request developer Daniel Sandoval writes, “Discuss.io forked the theta_gl repository to enable 360 functionality in the desktop (firefox/chrome) and mobile (android only) browsers. I’ve spent the last month building this thing and wanted to thank everyone on the forum for letting me lurk and learn. :-) … Wanted to make a PR from what I’ve built to enable discuss.io to use the THETA 360 camera with OpenTok’s webRTC streaming service. This PR adds new functions to call from the client side.”

Full tutorial and code available here.

These new Top 4 repos give you the foundation for starting off building 360 degree content quickly. For a broader look at what’s available, here’s a more comprehensive list of RICOH THETA focused repos on GitHub.