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Inspired by photographic sequences in skiing and snowboarding magazines, he thought of transposing the effect to QTVR, bringing the viewer inside the action. Further inspiration was found after seeing the FullscreenQTVR Extreme gallery, along with the work of Romuald Vareuse and Ignacio Ferrando.

A long time amateur photographer, Shu turned professional this year; one of his first contracts was for the 2007 brochure of the Val d’Isere resort. “They wanted panoramic shots that would sum up everything that has to be said, and getting rid of most of the usual comments and texts,” he says.

As composition is one of the most important ingredients in photography it follows that VRs require even greater attention to detail and positioning because, as Shu points out, you have to think of composition for the whole sphere. “For action VRs it’s sometimes hard to fill the whole space, and a part of the scene can be way less interesting that the part where the action happens,” he notes. “That’s why I try to include elements in the empty portions of the scene to make the whole 360 interesting.”

This is evident in all his panos. For example, in the freestyle motocross sequence pano below, opposite the main point of interest we see the crowd and the various reactions to the show. This was Shu’s second effort at action panoramas, and he shot it handheld. After that, he had his technique down.

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In the case of his stunning tandem paragliding (parapente) pano, which Shu also shot handheld, and as fast as possible as the whole scene is obviously moving, Shu places the glider in the middle of the pano and in the middle of the lake, so the entire pano is composed of beautiful scenery. He tries to reduce the parallax as much as possible, although he says he usually doesn’t succeed.

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“Action VRs are the most complicated VRs to do, as the postproduction work requires hours of photoshoping to do everything nice and seamless. But they're also the most exciting ones to realize, and represent a real challenge every time.”

The postproduction is fairly onerous: “Back home the first technical bit is the stitching process, where I setup control points manually … It usually takes three or four different layered photoshop renders (with the help of smartblend) before actually feeling the file would be the one to photoshop tune. Then starts the hard and long work in photoshop, of masking in/out, warping, distorting, retouching elements until I'm happy with the results.” In total, it’s about 10 to 15 hours of work, from uploading the photos to the final render, for the paragliding panos.

Shu has strong views on VR viewer technology, eschewing QuickTime since its last update. “Not only nothing has been done on the VR side of the technology for the last 10 years by the people from Apple,” he says, “but they actually killed the work and efforts from a lot of great developers like Patrick Cheatam of SpincontrolVR and Francis Gorge of PleinPot.

He now uses Aldo Hoeben’s Spi-V, which he calls “the best possible viewer” and Flash, “with the incredible work from Thomas Rauscher of pano2qtvr.“ Those two viewing technologies are to me the future of VR, with two great individuals fully committed to their product, constantly improving them from what their users tell them.” He’s putting his views in motion by redesigning his website to implement these two viewers, and will probably get rid of his QuickTime versions in the future.

View more of Tristan Shu’s photography .

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