**3.2. Panoramic images and virtual tour**

In this subsection, we want to focus on panoramic images and virtual tours. In spite of the difficulties to take measures in panoramas, they have an extraordinary capability to organize spatial information in qualitative terms, which is essential to describe hypothesis in forensic research.

Unlike conventional photography, in which a detail or a particular frame in the scene is shown, panoramic images have the property to collect the whole graphic information, covering a large angular field of view [9]. Thus, it is intended to get the feeling of being in the scene. The immersive experience can be achieved on a 360° field of view basis, greater than the human eye can see in an instant.

With the advent of digital age panoramic photography has boomed and multiplied its possible applications. Digital technology increases the flexibility of these documents to be altered, enhanced, rescaled, processed, resampled or fused in a 'simple' way. Computers are able to show the part of the panoramic picture corresponding to any direction and display it in real time. Thus, the feeling of a natural sweep through the panoramic image, which simulates plausibly turns to the viewer's head, is created.

Panoramic images can be projected on flat, spherical, cylindrical or cubic surfaces (**Figure 5**). To do this, it has to be solved the classic problem of mapping, which gives the optimal solution to represent on a flat support (either paper or digital) the surface of the Earth.

Panoramic images are on the basis to create virtual tours. This is an interactive non‐metric product of that allows travelling through complex scenarios, making virtual check and supervision. They also permit the addition of extra information in a various formats (text, photos and multimedia resources) that are accessed interactively. Virtual tours are integrated into a compact interface in which an interactive map acts as a guide to explore and travel through the single panoramas.

One of the strengths of the panoramic photography and virtual tours is its portability. In the end, panoramas are standard digital images; virtual tours only need flash viewers or html5 support (built‐in web browsers).

**Figure 5.** Different projections of panoramic imaging: flat (a), spherical (b), cylindrical (c) and cubic (d).
