MUGEN dataset and Wan360 model enable interactive 360-degree video control
MUGEN: Interactive Panoramic World Exploration via Camera Control
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Summary
Interactive panoramic videos let users explore a full 360-degree world by moving a virtual camera, but making these videos smoothly follow user movements is hard. The authors created MUGEN, a large collection of real 360-degree videos with detailed labels to train computer models. They also built Wan360, a system that can generate new panoramic videos that respond to user-controlled camera paths while keeping visuals consistent and natural-looking. Wan360 solves special challenges from how 360-degree video maps a sphere to a flat image.
What this means in practice
- •For virtual reality developers: Produce immersive 360-degree videos that users can navigate naturally with camera movements matching user control inputs.
- •For video game designers: Create dynamic panoramic environments where camera paths can be adjusted interactively in real time with consistent visual quality.
Authors
Jiaming Tan, Zhen Li, Shuwei Shi, Minggui Teng, Siqi Yang, Yuwei Wu, Bo Zheng, Chuanhao Li, Kaipeng Zhang
Abstract
Interactive panoramic video generation aims to synthesize immersive 360\textdegree{} videos that remain visually coherent while following user-specified camera trajectories during exploration. However, progress is limited by a coupled data-and-model gap: existing panoramic video datasets are often short, weakly annotated, or lack camera trajectories, while existing camera-controlled video generation models are designed for perspective videos and do not directly support panoramic geometry. In this paper, we introduce MUGEN and Wan360 to address these limitations. MUGEN is a large-scale real-world panoramic video dataset tailored to interactive 360-degree world exploration, comprising over 1,300 hours of at least 4K panoramic videos with rich semantic and geometric annotations. Built on MUGEN, we further present Wan360, a camera-controllable interactive panoramic video generation model. Panoramic videos are commonly represented by EquiRectangular Projection (ERP), which unfolds a spherical 360-degree view into a rectangular frame with cyclic longitude seams and pole distortions. To this end, Wan360 introduces three parameter-free ERP-aware components: periodic longitude RoPE for seam-consistent positional encoding, ERP-aware padding for reducing boundary artifacts, and random roll yaw for consistent learning. For camera control, Wan360 uses a panoramic Plücker embedding that represents camera motion with ERP rays rather than perspective pinhole rays. Experiments show that MUGEN serves as a data foundation for panoramic world exploration, and that Wan360 enables high-quality, temporally coherent, camera-controllable 360-degree video generation.