I built a 360° drone tour of Roatán — and hit some real engineering walls along the way

Hey everyone 👋

This project was born literally 6 hours ago.

I wanted to share something we've been building for our Roatán travel brands: an interactive 360° drone panorama tour of the island — think Google Street View, but flown by drone.

Live now (2 locations, more coming): https://roatanquebecois.ca/drone360/

What it is:

Fly to a spot on the island, tap around, and you're standing inside a fully navigable 360° sphere — pan, zoom, and jump between locations using bearing-linked arrows and a compass. Right now it's Bitcoin Center and the future hospital site at Dixon Cove, with dozens more planned along the coast.

How we did it (the fun part)

The drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) has a "Sphere Panorama" mode that auto-captures ~35 photos in a full rotation. Sounds simple — stitch them together, done. It was not that simple.

A few things we had to solve:

True north is a lie from the drone's compass. Steel/rebar near our shoot sites threw the magnetometer 17–23° off. Fix: compute the sun's actual position (azimuth + elevation) for the exact capture time/GPS, find the sun in the photo, and calibrate off that instead.

Ghosting/smear at the seams. Averaging overlapping frames together looked smooth in theory but blurred anything that moved even slightly between shots (parallax). Fix: feature-match every overlapping pair, refine each frame's pose to sub-pixel accuracy, then let ONE frame win at every seam instead of blending them.

Exposure bands in the sky. The drone auto-exposes each of the 35 shots independently — differences up to 50%. That showed up as visible "walls" in the sky at frame boundaries. Fix: solve a per-frame brightness correction across all 35 frames jointly, then a second pass that levels out whatever's left in smooth areas only (so it doesn't smear texture on the ground).

Delivery format. A single flattened image looks fine until you zoom — then it's mush. We switched to tiled, multi-resolution delivery (like Street View uses) so it stays sharp at any zoom level.

Every fix got a hard rule so we don't relearn it the hard way twice — full log of that is public in our repo if anyone's curious about the technical rabbit hole.

Why we're doing this

It's a new way to preview Roatán before you land — see the actual coastline, the actual dive spots, from the air, before you book. Also just genuinely fun to build.

What we'd love feedback on

Does the navigation (compass + arrows between spots) feel intuitive on your phone?
Anything that feels janky, slow, or confusing on first use?
What would make you actually want to explore more locations?

Try it here → https://roatanquebecois.ca/drone360/ — would genuinely appreciate any honest reactions, good or bad.

1 comment

I built a 360° drone tour of Roatán — and hit some real engineering walls along the way