Currently, we are witnessing a potent confluence of trends in technology and society. First, hardware manufacturers are trending towards powerful, connected, yet ultra-portable mobile devices. These devices have advanced sensors for video, GPS, and orientation, and support a fast and available network connection. At the same time, there is a growing familiarity with and desire for social information sharing. People of all ages are becoming accustomed to broadcasting a multitude of personal data such as what they are doing and where, photos, and videos, as well as interactive input such as comments on other people’s information streams, links, and recommendations. Because of their ubiquity and capabilities, advanced mobile devices such as smart phones have great potential for improving and extending interactions on social networks. Already, users can upload text, photos, videos from wherever they are with their phone. However, this type of interaction only captures a small part of what could be achieved. In fact, researchers in the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) fields have long studied the best ways to share experiences and communicate using high immersion devices. We believe that environment maps (or panoramas) provide a great starting point for combining social interaction with mobile mixed reality. Panoramas already can be considered one of the first public successes of VR [1]. They are useful for remote collaboration and exploration, because they provide a high level of immersion (surround-view imagery), but can be stored compactly in any common image format.
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