immerGallery Future Plans and Changelog

Future Plans

• We will look into ways to make it easier to bring your photos on your virtual reality device without the need to manually plugging it into your computer through a cable and to manually copy files over. We are investigating various cloud storage provider.
• In the shorter term, we will continue working on SMB (Samba) for easier usage
• Shorter-term, we investigate other methods of creating immersive galleries beyond our current approach through the web-tool
  
• Mid-term, we look into more convenient options for sharing your immersive galleries
• Mid-term, we are looking into porting to other VR platforms

immerGallery Release 1.2.5, build 101, 2024-03-14 "​Multiplayer Update"

• Multiplayer: ​What could be more fun than watching immersive galleries in VR and be teleported to new locations? Watching immersive galleries with your friends together in our new multiplayer mode for a great social VR experience! Join in with up to four players in our alpha test of this new feature.
• Support for multiple character sets: Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, ...
• More safety against phobia triggers. Under Settings - Phobias, we added a selection for arachnophobia and carnophobia. You can test it on our Halloween gallery (hiding the plastic spider) and the latter in our Osaka Reward gallery with the images containing sushi and meat.
• Bluetooth keyboard supported 
• .zip support optimized, >4 GB possible 
• Pastebin fix, favorites fix, UI improvements

immerGallery Release 1.2.4, build 97, 2024-01-25 "​3D Cylinder Wall Update"

• Image quality improvements for flat 2D, 3D and new immersive cylindrical 3D cinema wall
  Enjoy a the great sharpness with our updated presentation of regular 2D and 3D images. With the new immersive cylindrical 3D cinema wall, you can enjoy your 3D-SBS images in the highest quality wrapping around you. You can enable it for your images through Modify Image - Expert - CYL3D - Apply to folder (if desired) - Save all (if desired).
• We included a collection of "Spatial Photos" captured with the Spatialify app on the iPhone 15 Pro. Get it under Download - Included and enjoy it on our cylindrical wall.
• Missed any previous rewards? We have a solution for that now in our reward section.
• 120 Hz mode and various performance optimizations: Enjoy the app as fast and smooth as never before!
• Support for 4 favorite lists, so you can show different audiences different pre-selected content
• More images show the creation time now in the image info box at the bottom of the menu and exposure offsets, e.g. +0.33EV
• Smaller bugfixes (image rotations, offset sliders in menu, black image, ...)

immerGallery Release 1.2.3, build 90, 2023-12-26 "3D Camera 2.0 Photo Update"

• New auto-leveled 3D photo extraction for your Quest 3 3D camera! 
• Low-positioned water scale placement for cropping your 16:9 3D videos
• Added option to enforce a black background instead of ambient colors for images shown on cinema walls. This fits better for some 3D images where the borders are black.
• UI improvements: full scroll up and down buttons, added unmark all favorites in folder under "...", added social media icons under Help where you can reach us quickly, background and voice-over sliders for indiviual images are now in the "Modify image" section to fine tune your immersive galleries.
• Added dedicated camera support for: Canon R6 Mark II with 5.2mm Dual Fisheye Lens and the Pano X V2 camera
• Bug fixes: fixed bug where controllers did not work on startup
• 1.2.3a: bug fix for keyboard
• 1.2.3b: bug fix for moved flat 2D/3D cinema wall black

immerGallery Release 1.2.2, build 87, 2023-11-09 "3D Camera Update"

• Added 3D Camera menu point for experts under Settings - Advanced. 
  
• Record videos with a water scale to avoid roll and pitch rotations of the head during recording
• Auto-switch water scale mode: showing the water scale 3 seconds on, 1 second off and on again to allow taking well aligned screenshots of a recorded video, e.g. in VLC Player with Shift-S to be used as 3D photos
• UI improvements: Unmark sound for favorites, favorite title fix after removal, fixed scrollbar "Download - Rewards", after modify: format icon updated correctly for SMB and UPnP

immerGallery Release 1.2.1, build 80, 2023-10-23 "Quest 3 Update"

• Meta Quest 3 optimizations: 
  ○ ​​Higher image quality ​enabled
  ○ Touch Plus controller labels
  ○​ Touch Plus haptics adjusted
  
• Improved image organization: Mark images as favorites and delete all these (or all except these) with the new menu at the vertical three dots ⋮ button.
• A circle in the menu reminds about currently unlockable rewards
  
• Optimized automatic image format detection
  

immerGallery Release 1.2, build 77, 2023-08-31 "Premium DLCs and Rewards Update"

• Dive into historic East Germany with two impressive DLCs / In-App Purchases. The collections of highly immersive VR180 stereophotos, many with English voice-overs, include:
  • East Germany DLC 1: Explore Dresden and Leipzig. These renowned cities come to life with churches, marketplaces, and history lessons on a boat tour. €4.99 / $5.99.
  • East Germany DLC 2: Visit Weimar and Jena, the hometowns of the legendary German writers Goethe and Schiller. €4.99 / $5.99.
  
  Only by getting the bundle of both DLCs (€9.99 / $9.99) will receive additionally more than 50 other 3D images from cities like Cottbus, Chemnitz, Erfurt, Eisenach, and Potsdam.
  
  
• Introducing immerGallery Rewards: Every week, users can unlock a small to medium-sized, brand-new immersive gallery. By collecting all four weekly rewards in a month, one additionally receives a large monthly reward gallery. In September 2023, these are the following galleries with the number of photos: Freudenberg (6), Bangkok Chinatown (12), Dubai (18), Cosplay (14), and Venice (22).
• SMB / Samba beta 2: Included automatic scanning for SMB v2/v3 servers. Support for bmp, png, tiff, webp and static gif.
• Version 1.2a: faster unpacking after download
• Version 1.2b: fixed reward download issue

immerGallery Release 1.1.9, build 76, 2023-07-31 "SMB and Pastebin Update"

• As the local storage space on standalone VR headsets is limited, use your SMB network shared folders, e.g. from a Windows PC or Network Attached Storage (NAS), to easily access your immersive images in immerGallery! This is our first beta of this feature.
• Downloading multiple galleries from the web using a virtual keyboard is not ideal. Use our Pastebin feed support to easily access a list of your own downloadable shared galleries or content from your friends. We parse the Pastebin posting for .zip files and let you download and extract them with a single click.
• Easily start a slideshow with a configured image switching time by using our n ew "Play" button in the menu top bar or by clicking the thumbstick of your controller. 
• Improved automatic image format detection
• GPS map bug fix
• Rare image rotation bug fix
• UPnP bug fix
• Preview of upcoming Premium Downloads

immerGallery Release 1.1.8, build 68, 2023-06-21 "MP3 Player Update"

• Two new high-quality galleries:

• ○
  We reworked our included Sample Gallery to show the best VR photos from around the world in various image formats. 
• ○
  Enjoy our second beautiful Switzerland gallery (thanks Peter Wehrli!) with great panoramas that wrap all around you!

• Music is important! Watching your photos with the music you love is now easily possible with our integrated MP3 Player. Upload your own mp3 files into your Quest's /Music folder. The player automatically respects other sound sources, e.g. it will disable other background audio if your own music is already running. And more: assign and save your own music easily to your images, so next time you watch it, it will play back automatically!
• UI Overhaul

• New curved UI look
• Downloadable galleries have a download info box with description, image formats and three thumbnails for preview
• Image formats are now represented by icons

• Camera support: TECHE 3DVR180, ​Calf Professional 3D VR180 Camera, Vuze 3D (updated)
• Visual improvements on hot air balloon VR environment
• Performance optimizations
• Quest 1 Deprecation: due to Meta’s end of support for the Quest 1 SDK, we are prevented from keeping immerGallery updated properly on that device. The version 1.1.8 could be the last static immerGallery Quest 1 version. It will continue to run as is, but might not get future updates.
  
• Version 1.1.8a: fixed deleting images workflow
  

immerGallery Release 1.1.7, build 65, 2023-04-07 "Happy Easter Update"

• Two new high-quality galleries:

• ○
  Enjoy beautiful Switzerland with high-quality cylindrical panoramas and Canon 5.2mm VR180 shots!
• ○
  Learn about the famous Bavarian tradition of Decorated Easter Wells. We show various wells, including the world's largest Easter Well according to the ​Guinness Book of Records with 11,000 decorated easter eggs.

• New environments: Be inside a Hot Air Balloon to enjoy your drone panoramas! For your Easter mood, enjoy our new Easter environment with many easter eggs and animated animals.
• New audio: two more relaxing tracks, pure ocean waves and bird sounds
• File management: delete files and folders inside your /Pictures folder after a confirmation dialogue.
• Rotate regular 2D photos by 90° degrees left / right.
  
• You can now swap the left and right eye channel for 3D photos which are misaligned inside the appUPnP​: more tolerance reagarding timeouts
  

immerGallery Release 1.1.6, build 61, 2023-03-02 "Hot Air Balloon Update"

• Two new high-quality galleries:

• ○
  Amazing Partnachklamm in Bavaria! Watch in an innovative and immersive 3D format the new gallery from photographer Erik Grösche. Visit the gorge with the river through the mountains in the wild river next to you!
• ○
  A fantastic drone gallery from the USA from photographer Scott Kosel! Watch canyons, see birds fly over you and watch out for these hot air balloons!

• New environments to use for your images: St. Patrick's Day, Birds and Hot Air Balloons
• New audio: Irish music and wind
• Many improvements to UPnP (beta): the scans are much faster now and are saved between app starts until a manual refresh is triggered. ​Reliability of finding files and the file name was increased.
• A dynamically generated map is now added to the controller if GPS ​coordinates are found either inside the jpg metadata or are set through .immerVR files. Zoom the map with the grip button pressed and thumbstick up/down.
• The "Modify Image" section has been improved to allow setting environments, audio and switching times ​separately to apply them to a full folder. Expert dialogue for format selection has been cleaned up.
• New option to keep the laser turned on with the menu closed. The use case is for using immerGallery with screencasting and using the laser as a pointer to the outside spectators.
• Various performance and memory optimizations.

immerGallery Release 1.1.5, build 49, 2023-01-23 "Cylindrical Panorama Update"

• Support for cylindrical panoramas including sample gallery of panoramic images. Take wide photos and display them on a cylindrical cinema wall. Easily change the opening angle of the cylinder up to almost 360-degrees to match the field-of-view from your image. If you only watched these images on a flat screen before, they will enable a completely new immersive experience shown in virtual reality!
• New sample gallery of New Year's Eve in the medieval town Rothenburg, Germany. Walk through the gates of the castle, watch various old towers and a beautiful classical downtown city in the "Fachhaus" style. As it gets dark, enjoy celebrations on the old market place with a cool laser projector show and fireworks.
• Overhaul of the in-app Download menu with a new dropdown element for prefixes. For Dropbox links to .zip files, it is now enough to provide the Dropbox-ID to download e.g. from https://www.dropbox.com/s/hcy5kzded3/myZipFile.zip?dl=1 only "hcy5kzded3" is required in our address bar.
• In the modify image section, timings for automatic image switches can now easily be applied and be used for a full folder
• Fine selections for users with acrophobia (fear of heights). Chose between off, medium and high counter-measuerments. In medium, in all monoscopic or cinema-wall presented images, an artifical floor is added. In high, all images will have the artificial floor.
• Various other UI improvements, e.g. added Meta Quest Pro controller labels, sounds output when UPnP scan or downloads are finished, new app start logo.
• Smaller bug fixes

immerGallery Release 1.1.4, build 44, 2022-12-18 "Xmas Update"

• Enjoy your personal regular 2D and 3D images in a great winter Xmas environment with dynamic snow and Santa flying around delivering gifts!
• To feel the winter even more, we have two new immersive galleries:

1. Over 20 images from Iceland in the VR180 and 360° format including some drone panoramas of the great environment. (thx Thomas Lippert)
2. About 25 images in 360-3D from the highest mountain in Germany: Zugspitze (thx Erik Grösche)

• Customize your immerGallery start environment with four different start images and background music tracks
• Dedicated image format support for LabPano Pilot Era, LabPano Pilot One, Insta360 Pro, Insta360 Pro 2 and Insta360 Titan
• Many smaller UI/UX improvements, e.g. a spinning circle during UPnP scanning and downloading in the menu, better colliders for menu interaction, added ocean sound button, music-switches use fading
• Various performance and memory optimizations
  

immerGallery Release 1.1.3, build 43, 2022-11-16

• Small hotfix

immerGallery Release 1.1.3, build 42, 2022-11-16 "Passthrough Update"

• With the new video passthrough mode, you can watch your regular images (2D and 3D) while still enjoying the environment around you. For VR180, you can get a live view of what is behind you. For Meta Quest Pro, we do support color passthrough!
• A brand new immersive gallery with VR180 stereo photos from South Korea is available for download inside the app! (full version only)
• Various UI/UX improvements, e.g., haptic feedback and sounds for menu elements
• Memory optimizations for Quest 1 users
• Support for Labpano Pilot Pano 360° cam and improved DJI 360° drone panorama support

immerGallery Release 1.1.2, build 38, 2022-10-24 "Halloween Update"

• We added a special environment to enjoy your Halloween images shown on the cinema wall.
• We present that new environment in our new Halloween immersive gallery about the Little Pumpkin Ghost at the spooky Castle Wolfstein, Germany. Various cool VR180 and 360 images guide you through the experience!
• We added a falling autumn leaves environment which can be used for all image formats to bring you into the mood of a nice walk outside in late October.
• Various stability fixes, performance and memory optimizations.
• Fixed UPnP bug and improved scanning speed.
• Improved UI / UX: when watching favorites, you can now remove a single favorite and stay inside the playback mode. Changed help dialogue to send a message to us developers to use the built-in HMD keyboard. Tweaks for the timing of enabling and disabling favorites. Updated folder icon (credit: flaticon.com).
• Improved support for Insta360 X3 and Insta360 RS One jpg files.

immerGallery Release 1.1.1, build 37, 2022-09-29 "Underwater Update"

• At the same day of the release of the Walkabout Minigolf™: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea DLC, we release our new underwater environment that you can use to view your low field-of-view 2D and 3D images!
• We have two new, free exciting galleries:

1. Underwater 3D World: 10 great 3D diving photos from Claudia Hirsch, captured in Hurghada, Egypt
2. Fan Gallery Walkabout Minigolf™: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: we take a look at the brand new screenshots from the DLC inside our underwater environment. 2D, but still very immersive. 

• Smaller UI changes and fixes: fixed a bug where after downloading a gallery it didn't show up before refreshing. After the download, there is now an "Open" button to quickly bring you to the new content. Deletion now has a dialogue to confirm deleting an image or folder.
• Performance optimizations for users with lots of deep folders and files

immerGallery Release 1.1, build 36, 2022-09-12 "Download Gallery Update"

• Added "Download Gallery" section. In the full version of immerGallery, you can download zipped immersive galleries through the URL input field. We have quick prefixes for URLs on Dropbox, bit.ly and others - just press the button with the http-prefix to toggle. Password-protected .zip files are supported as well.
• In the "Download Gallery" section we have three new free galleries for you to watch:

1. An evening and night at the Nuremberg Volksfest : watch 30 immersive images, most of them captured with the professional Canon RF 5.2mm VR180 stereo lens. Music and voice-overs tell the story of this evening and night.
2. Drone Panoramas: Many thanks to Marton from relaxvideo.hu. Amazing 360° mono drone captures show you different places in Greece, Croatia and Hungary
3. QooCam EGO hacked for 3D-360: Many thanks to Dean Zwikel! He used the low field-of-view 3D consumer camera QooCam EGO and made a series of shots to combine them to 3D-360 images. Watch amazing images from parks in the US!

• We significantly improved the displayed image quality of VR photos. It almost feels like your HMD was upgraded to a higher resolution!
• Relevant jpg EXIF metadata is shown when the menu is open that can help you duplicating the camera setup of the displayed photo, e.g.: Canon EOS R5, RF5.2mm F2.8 L, 1/320 sec, f/3.5, ISO 100
• Use pitch rotation to watch your images while laying down on your sofa through the settings dialogue.
• To handle the increasing disk usage after many downloaded galleries, we now have an option to delete downloaded galleries through the trashcan icon. This only works for the unzipped galleries right now, but we might extend this to local galleries in the future.
• Performance-optimizations for loading very high resolution content.
• Improved automatic format detection for 3D-360 images.
• Improved UPnP handling for the case where more than one UPnP server is within the same network.
• Smaller UI improvements
• Lastly, there is also a significant change for immerGallery Demo: Before, your own images could only be shown in the full version of immerGallery. As we received feedback from our users that they would like to test if certain images would load in the full version, we are now showing the first 10 images located in the /Pictures folder as a free preview. immerGallery Demo also contains the three new downloadable galleries.
  

immerGallery Release 1.0.8, build 34, 2022-07-27 "UPnP Update"

• UPnP (beta). You can now access your images on your home media server with UPnP / DLNA in immerGallery! This feature is currently in beta, so please be considerate if there are still a few bugs and missing features. You can enable it under settings. It does parse through all folders and uses automatic image format detection and smart thumbnail generation as you are used to. However, adding UPnP images to favorites or refreshing is not possible yet. Sadly, the way UPnP was designed with the focus on media files only, the support for the accompanying .immerVR files will not work with default installations of UPnP servers. Therefore, we do recommend using UPnP images just as such: standalone images, but not immersive galleries with your own audio. You still can add prefefined audio or special effects through the menu "Current Image".
• Stability fixes for very large folders. We got reports from heavy users with a large amount of images inside a folder which lead to an inferior user experience. We stabilized this, but still recommend for best performance to use max. 300 images per folder, even though we support more.
• Small bug fixes and UI improvements

immerGallery Release 1.0.7, build 33, 2022-06-28 "Favorites Update"

• Use many hearts! Tag your favorite images and folders to easily find them again. You can mark them through
  a) the heart button on the top part of the menu
  b) by clicking into the top right corner of a thumbnail
  c) by pressing the B or Y button when viewing an image with the menu closed
• Offline support! immerGallery launches now without Internet connection! 
• Friends of long filenames can now use an option to using a smaller font for thumbnails. 
• Fixed a time synchronization bug for immersive galleries using automatic switching to the next image while keeping the same background and/or voice-over across multiple pictures. The countdown will now start once audio is fully loaded and starts to play. This should make it easy to keep in sync with audio.

immerGallery Release 1.0.6, build 32, 2022-06-01 "Meadowverse Update"

• "Welcome to the Meadowverse!" - we added the meadow environmental effect with butterflies, pollen and dust
• New sample gallery about 3D-360° photography. Thanks to Erik Grösche for the great photos!
• We extended our automatic image format detection to include low field of view 3D images. It will work with well-aligned stereo images. If it should fail, please check if your alignment is correct in tools like Stereo Photo Maker. (We had misaligned images in our own Loreo photo collection.)
• If you use web-based Dropbox through the Meta Quest Browser, you can download zip files of full folders and their subfolders. After the download finished, we automatically pick up the zip files in immerGallery and offer you to unzip them. This is a great way of transfering your immersive galleries easily without using a USB cable to your Quest.
• Instead of only changing an image individually through the "Current Image" menu, you can now also apply the same settings to all images in the same folder. The same image format, background audio and special effect will be used for all images in the folder. You can try setting an image to "Classical" background music, apply it to the folder and keep enjoying the music while browsing your images in that folder.
  
• We added a refresh-button which can be used when the playback is stopped. The use case is that you have the Quest plugged in over USB while using immerGallery. You take off the headset, copy a file and want to see it listed without restaring the app: just press the refresh button.
• Added the new value "disabledBackgroundForLowFov" for .immerVR files. If used for low-fov 2D or 3D images, the background will be black.
• Minor UI/UX tweaks and general bug fixes.

immerGallery Release 1.0.5, build 31, 2022-05-19 "QooCam EGO Update"

• With the release of the QooCam EGO, we support on the same day the automatic image format detection for QooCam EGO photos. Just copy your photos into the Meta Quest 2 pictures folder and enjoy them in immerGallery. A review with samples images of the camera is available at DIYPhotography and at 360rumors. You can download all of their photo samples (even the smaller sized ones) from their website and watch them in immerGallery.
• The "cinema wall" for low field-of-view 2D/3D can now be moved back and forth with the thumbsticks. There is a resting point at zero offset which is the recommended distance.
• Various performance and memory optimizations. Loading much larger images and folders with much more content inside are now supported.
• We added detection for the file name suffix _rf52, e.g. beach_rf52.jpg, referring to Canon's 5.2mm Dual Fisheye Lens, to force detection to that format. For regular photos this is purely optional and not recommended! However, a valid use case would be to take screenshots inside VLC Player of an equirectangular video taken with the Canon 5.2mm and then wanting to watch these screenshots in immerGallery. We updated our pdf with file suffixes.
• Various smaller UI/UX improvements

immerGallery Release 1.0.4, build 30, 2022-05-10

• Apply pre-defined background audio files directly inside the app (e.g. classical, people, rain)
• Option to keep the same music and voice-overs playing through multiple images, if the according .immerVR files references to the same audio files
• Option for automatic image switching after a certain amount of seconds can be programmed into .immerVR files (autoSwitchToNextImage)
• Option to disable the image switch sound in the .immerVR files (disableImageSwitchSound)
• Added support for Google Cardboard Camera app with automatic image format detection and pole filling
• General improvements for auto format detection
• Performance optimizations for keeping the frame rate stable at 90 Hz even with busier workloads
• Bug fix where Google Photosphere images might not have been loading correctly

immerGallery Release 1.0.3, build 29, 2022-04-25

• Enable special effects like snow and rain directly in the app without an external .immerVR file.
• Usually you should not need to bother setting the image format, but you can now optionally override the results from the automatic image format detection inside the app. If you encounter images that are wrongly detected, please email them to us. 
• Users coming from other software expressed their desire to have an option of enforcing an image format selection through the file name or file extension. As an example, a user takes a 3D photo through the Android smartphone app "3DSteroid Pro". As low-field-of-view 3D was only supported through .mpo-files, the user can now rename the image from beach.jpg to beach_lr.jpg or to beach.jps for low-field-of-view 3D left/right format. A full list for supported file name hints and file extensions is shown on the website of immerGallery in the FAQ and available as pdf here.
• Format hints from file names are automatically removed when displaying the file name in the app below the thumbnails.
• The height for regular 2D portrait images on the cinema wall was reduced for better viewing comfort.
• Improved automatic detection for content from certain Insta360 and Ricoh cameras. Furthermore, improved general VR-360 mono equirect detection.
  
• Small bugfix for 360-3D rendering

immerGallery Release 1.0.2, build 28, 2022-04-17

• Cinema wall for 2D/3D is now moveable. Our users requested to be able to change the distance to the cinema wall on which regular 2D images and low field of view 3D images are shown. Through our new advanced settings dialogue, the position can now be changed front and back, up and down and left and right. The offsets are saved.
• We had reports of some image files not showing up. So far, we were only showing images larger than 200 kilobyte as smaller ones are often only thumbnails or too low resolution for the big screen. The minimum file size for images can now be adjusted in the advanced settings.
• The file extension .jpeg with the extra 'e' is now picked up automatically as well.
• We are now automatically hiding the second Quest controller as only one is needed and the second one might block the view. As before, with the click of the trigger button on the left or the right controller, the primary controller is set.
• Bug fix regarding custom generated map files (e.g. 01_map.jpg). They show up now.
• Bug fix for automatic detection of Canon EOS R5 C (cinema-focused camera body)