PanoPlayer

Explore panoramic video, listen to spatial audio, and see sound directions live in VS Code.

PanoPlayer brings panoramic video, four-channel first-order Ambisonics (FOA), and a live PowerMap into one player. Review spatial recordings, explore panoramic footage, and compare sound directions with the scene. Standard mono and stereo media play too.

Panorama view shows the full scene alongside sound directions. Projection, view, PowerMap, and audio settings stay together below the picture.

Explore The Scene

• Panorama unfolds the image for a full-scene overview of the picture and sound directions.
• Perspective renders a perspective view of your current heading. Drag to look around, scroll to adjust the field of view, and reset to face forward.
• Viewfinder thumbnail marks the current field of view on a panorama overview, so you always know where you are looking.
• Switch views directly with tabs without reopening the media. Seek, adjust volume, mute, or enter full screen from the playback controls.

The panorama thumbnail marks the current view. With Binaural selected, FOA audio rotates with your viewing direction.

See And Hear Sound Directions

Live PowerMap estimates sound directions from four-channel FOA audio and updates a MUSIC heatmap during playback. Toggle the overlay or adjust its opacity to compare sound locations with the picture, without changing the source media.

Binaural monitoring uses Omnitone to render FOA for headphones. In Perspective view, turning the camera also changes your listening direction. Stereo Monitor provides an alternative mix fixed to the recording axes.

Explicit FOA settings support WYZX / WXYZ channel order and SN3D / N3D normalization. Set order and normalization independently without reopening the file.

Four channels do not automatically mean FOA. Spatial processing expects first-order Ambisonics, not ordinary quadraphonic speaker audio. PowerMap currently uses single-source MUSIC for qualitative direction review; it is not a calibrated sound-pressure measurement or source-separation tool.

180°, 360°, And EAC

Near-square frames default to 180° ERP; other aspect ratios default to 360° ERP. This is an initial guess, not projection detection. Confirm Projection and Layout manually for EAC and stereo sources. Stereo support means single-eye playback, not stereoscopic output to a VR headset.

Spatial Audio Without Video

Play FOA WAV files with a standalone full-sphere PowerMap, channel-order and normalization settings, and binaural monitoring. No placeholder video is needed.

A live direction map from four-channel WAV. Mono and stereo audio automatically use Bypass, without FOA analysis or binaural rendering.

Mono and stereo video retain Panorama and Perspective viewing. Audio passes through with its decoded channels preserved, with volume and mute controls.

Streaming And Remote Media

• Four-channel MP4 + AAC and WebM + Opus use bundled WASM audio decoders. Playback decodes as data arrives rather than waiting for a whole-file transcode.
• WAV playback is supported. MOV and MKV also have open-with entries; playback depends on the codecs inside, not just the file extension.
• Local, Remote SSH, and Cloud IDE media are read from the workspace host, without manually downloading the entire file first.
• No extra decoder setup: the current player needs no user-installed FFmpeg, FFprobe, or Python, and no additional server or port forwarding.
• Source files stay unchanged, and media is not uploaded to third-party processing services.

Video decoding depends on the host browser's WebCodecs support. Perspective view, EAC, and single-eye cropping require WebGL2. The player supports 1, 2, or 4 channels and uses the primary audio track. Other channel counts, track selection, FuMa normalization, and arbitrary cube-face layouts are not supported.

Open Your Media

Choose Open With > PanoPlayer on a media file, or run PanoPlayer: Open Media.

Requires VS Code 1.84+ and a Node extension host with access to workspace files. Cloud IDE must allow Webviews, Workers, WebAssembly, and Web Audio. Browser-only vscode.dev without a remote extension host is not supported.

Screenshots show the actual player Webview running in a local Chrome test host, not mockups. They do not imply validation on every Cloud IDE or platform.

For installation, migration, and development, see the technical reference. See third-party notices for component licenses.