Testing.
Last ungarbled image data from an outlying scientific probe, before it went dark. …
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WHOA! That made me dizzy. 
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That’s cool! How’d you do it?
The background distorts a bit when you pan around, but I think that’s just how these kind of pictures work.
It is really easy actually. You just have to render out your scene as equirectangular. Set the size shape right 2x1 proportions. I put my camera in the middle of the fleet too rather than where you would to take a photo of a scene. By the same render style you can turn a scene into an hrdi to use. Yes it looks best zoomed in a bit I think, fully zoomed out it sees too much and distorts a bit.
It took me much longer to find a free hosting site for the render so as to display it here.
The ships were all generated near instantly by a blender add on too. 
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That’s EXACTLY what I was thinking just now when you mentioned equirectangular, as that’s how HDRis are made. 
I suspect there is a lot more to HDRIs, they have this dynamic range thing. However the basic shaping of usually multiple photographic images so they work like this, seems to be being done by other communities. There appear even to be a few special cameras that take the image in one shot.
I have in the past looked at some explanations of hrdi making and it melts my poor old brain. Switching between various softwares, not always free. What I need is something that works like Meshlab which photo scans to objects, drop in the photos, press start come back hours later job sorted. (ok huge polys, but solvable, sortable)
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I use HDRi backgrounds in other 3D software I use, 1) because it’s the lazy way to set up a scene, especially an outdoor scene, and 2) because those I download from some of the good free HDRi sites are set up with the proper lighting, depending on where you have your camera pointing in the HDRi scene.
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My friend has a 360 camera that can take full surround pictures in one go. I think it can do HDRIs, but he doesn’t use it for that. Anyway it was relatively inexpensive I think.
I especially like to use an HDRI when I have objects in a scene that depend on reflections, such as these beer botles. The models themselves are so simple, but I think the reflection and refraction make it look pretty nice, and it’s all due to the HDRI.
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Yes, I thought that was a HDRi background, and yes, they often “make the scene”.
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