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Very cool...
It's called Quicktime VR. QuickTime VR - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I've done similar work but not u/w - that has to be a lot more difficult.
What you basically do is generate a series of shots 30o's apart for the full 360o - I had a special tripod with an index stop. Any good digital camera will work.
Then you "stitch" them together on a computer - the s/w automatically matches the ends of each shot to the next one. The zoom features etc. are also added by the s/w.
I'd guess from the small amount of apparent distortion that whoever did this one used a fairly wide-angle lens - it's also why you can pan up and down. You really need a stable base for the camera or the results can be disorienting. Although I have done one freehand once but where the images didn't exactly match there was some ghosting.
You can also create linked hotspots that either go to a still image, a website, or another panorama. I used it once for a virtual tour thru a museum gallery - you could see the view from each end as well as read about some of the artwork.
The player s/w is called Panorama VR and it runs on top of Adobe's Flash player. Flash Panorama Player and QTVR Converter - Pano2VR - Garden Gnome Software Apple also provides player s/w but when I did it we had to instruct people to download a browser plug-in from the website first. I believe it's now incorporated into later versions of Quicktime.
I used this one from Peace River Studios:Now I do VR Photography underwater.