The RICOH THETA S is an extremely exciting product. We’re at the beginning of a larger movement for the general public to use 360 images and 360 videos. Every week, I learn new things about what major companies are doing with 360 images and videos. Facebook, YouTube, Google, The New York Times, are just a few of many organizations that are now supporting 360 media.

My colleague, Jesse Casman, and I are helping RICOH with technical marketing activities in the US. Although, we are outside consultants, we feel like we’re part of a much larger community that includes RICOH, independent developers, enthusiasts, companies, and frankly, anyone that thinks that 360 pictures and videos are cool.

Although we are technical marketers, we’re super enthusiastic about developers and even though we have limited resources, we’re are trying to figure out what we can do to help. Feedback from developers is important. The services are for you.

Here is our plan to provide basic help to you with our limited resources and limited technical knowledge.

Forum

Jesse and I will go into the forum and answer questions when we can. For the questions that we can’t answer, we’ll rely on the community. If the question relates to a broad group of people, we will try and replicate the problem and then report back to RICOH engineers. An example of a problem we’ll escalate is a problem with an application due to changes in Adobe Air.

There are certain requests for information that RICOH can’t provide. For example, RICOH can’t release lens parameter information or stitching library algorithms. For these questions, we will respond that RICOH can’t provide the information and organize the requests so that RICOH managers have an understanding of what the community is requesting.

GitHub Repository Management

We will organize code examples from the community. The examples cover both the control of the camera as well as basic functionality such as viewing a equirectangular image.

Over time, we will either test the code ourselves or get help from the community in testing the code. If the listing becomes too large, we will organize the repositories into sub-directories and categories.

Blog

There’s a lot of great content out there about using the RICOH THETA S. Some of it is in Japanese and a lot of it is in English. The developer community in Japan is very active. Jesse can read Japanese quickly and I can struggle through it. We’ll combine content from Japan with English content and provide articles in English about viewing and streaming content, controlling the camera with the API and using THETA products and media with other tools or services from companies like Google, Facebook, Oculus, and Unity.

Community Guide

We’re building a community guide based on questions and responses about the most common topics. Hopefully, we’ll be able to pull popular topics from the blog.

Ready for more?

Latest Community Tips at the THETA Unofficial Guide