And just like that, another year flew by.
This year, we spent time working not only on Pano2VR 7, but also working on our latest release, Pano2VR 8. Suffice to say it’s been a busy year!
Development
We know we just announced this, but we’ll happily repeat ourselves, Pano2VR 8 beta was released and features support for 3D Models and Gaussian Splats. You can use the models as part of the tour or just use them for smooth transitions. We even added support for the new SOG format which is web-optimized and creates much smaller file sizes.
Of course that’s not all! We added a new built-in skin that is minimalistic, clean, and modern. Quaranta features a navigation compass with thumbnails, a thumbnail menu, light and dark themes, and even the option to change the icon’s shape.
The themes found in Quaranta are made using another new feature that lets us create UI elements. For Custom Properties, you can now create a UI for each property. These can be drop-down lists, radio buttons, and text fields. You can build the same type of UI for the skin configuration, too.
So, that’s the short list! There is much more and you can read about it in this post or take a look at the changelog.
Also, if you’re looking for help in working with 3D models in Pano2VR, check out the documentation pages that include step-by-step written instructions and be sure to watch this tutorial video. Keep a look-out for more tutorials soon!
Tutorials
Speaking of tutorials, this year, ours were a mix of video tutorials and tutorial posts. We hope you not only saw them, but also found them useful, if not inspiring.
Our friend Thomas Bredenfeld continued his in-depth tutorial series on Extending Pano2VR. Here’s the entire playlist:
We also showed you how you can create Narration for Immersive Virtual Tours and how to Remove Large Objects using Patches, along with a tutorial on how to level panoramas in Pano2VR.
Finally, we highlighted a project by Pano2VR user Claudio from alpenguides.de, showcasing his unique use of Pano2VR as a virtual gallery. If you missed it, check it out!
We have a lot more highlights in the pipeline so stay subscribed to get these posts in your inbox. We are always looking to showcase your projects to not only show how you use Pano2VR and Object2VR, but to also spark inspiration for others. If you have a project to share, send us an email.
Mini Conference
We briefly left Vienna to meet up with like-minded panorama, 3D, and VR enthusiasts in Krakow, Poland. We were a small group, but the show-and-tell was inspiring and most of all, fun! A big shout out to Federicco Debetto and Dimitar Kunev for organizing it!
That’s about it for 2025. We are really excited for 2026!
From everyone on the Garden Gnome team, we wish you and yours a lovely holiday season!