A 360º Image is basically a spherical image! It is a composition of an image in a globe-like shape. There are two types of 360º images. The first type is with viewing perspective from inside the globe, where you either turn around to look at the image, or spin the image to see it all. It is simply viewed as if you are standing in a room and slowly turning around and looking at the room from the floor to the ceiling.
The second type is from an outside perspective. This is similar to having an object in your hand and spinning it to view all of the sides. Like looking at a basketball and either keeping it stationary and walking around it, or spinning it to see it all. For our purposes, we are mainly referring to spherical images, which you will view from within/inside perspective. A 360º image is generally a combination of 2 or more images taken from the same spot but covering different angles in order to display what the eye of a person can see if they stand in one position and turn around looking in every direction.
So basically, photos have to be taken and then stitched together to create a spherical image. Some cameras have in-built stitching applications, but in most cases, the capture application is different from the stitching application.
Of course, today there are cameras that have lenses that can take only one photo (with a single-lens) to capture the whole sphere (with the exception of the camera footprint). There are cameras that can also do this using 2, 3, 4, or more lenses, meaning the images are actually merged at the time of capturing, or some type of software is used in the camera to stitch/merge the images together to make a spherical image.
After a spherical panorama is created in the Equirectangular form as above, we then start editing it and enhancing the mage by removing shadows of tripod stands where possible, or security cameras, and blurring out faces and license plates, etc.
