When it comes to videos, most of time we’re subjected to the whims of the person behind the camera and the director, only allowing us to see what they want us to see. We suppose this is pretty standard and to be expected, but if you’d rather have the freedom of being able to look at different parts of the video, you now can as YouTube has recently announced their support for 360-degree videos.
This follows an earlier announcement in which support was promised to be coming soon. Now 360-degree videos aren’t exactly a new thing, but for those looking for such videos online, YouTube will now support the upload of such videos and will come with a user interface that allows the viewer to interact with the video, panning it left, right, up, and down and letting them see whatever it is they want to see, which you can try for yourself in the video above.
For those watching these videos on their mobile phones, YouTube has also announced that the 360-degree video support will come to the Android YouTube app. Users will be able to pan the video by moving their phone or tablet around to see the different angles. As for iOS users, YouTube states that they are still working on bringing the feature to the iPhone and iPad, so in the meantime we guess you will have to rely on the web version first.