Happy Friday everyone! 
This week I want to show off one of my favourite hidden gems in Mediasite: the ability to turn a flat, wide-canvas video into a fully immersive 360° interactive training experience.
Here’s the idea: you design a video on a wide “canvas” layout, think of it a bit like a panoramic image. It doesn’t need to be shot with a 360° camera. When you enable the 360° video playback option in Mediasite, that flat video gets wrapped into a spherical player, and suddenly your viewer can look around the scene.
Now here’s where it gets really fun. You layer interactive hotspots on top. Click on that door to open the next training module. Click on the fire extinguisher to learn how to use it. Click on the safety sign to read the procedure. All baked right into the video.
Here’s a look at the new 360° video in the interaction editor. Remember you can add hotspots, buttons and text in here, either to a different point in the same video, a new video link or to an external URL.
Here’s how it looks in the 360° space with our new interactive hotspots allowing users to either click on the next step, of if they have a VR headset on, they can simply look at the ‘Video’s openen’ button.
Want to experience the example video for yourself, take a look below:
Pro Tip:
When designing your canvas video, remember it will be wrapped horizontally. Keep important content and text away from the very edges where it may distort or wrap out of view.
The result? A training video that feels like a proper VR walkthrough, with no 360° camera required. Just a bit of creativity in how you design the source video and a few clicks in the hotspot editor.
This feature is available in Mediasite version 8.31.0+
Have you tried combining 360° playback with hotspots yet? I’d love to see what you’ve built. Drop your examples or questions below! 
Do you think you could see yourself using this workflow?
