Between a photograph and a 3D model
The choice usually gets presented in two stages. You have photographs in a PDF, or you have a 3D model built. The first is cheap and says little, the second says a lot and costs accordingly.
In between sits a form that rarely comes up. A 360 capture records a place as it is, in one pass, and lets somebody look around as though they were standing there. No model, no interaction, no costs running into the tens of thousands.
For a surprisingly large share of the questions organisations put to visualisation, that is exactly enough.
Where it works surprisingly well
Site induction and orientation. Somebody who has to walk onto the site on Monday does not need a simulation. They need to know where the gate is, how the zoning runs, where the assembly point sits and what the route to their workplace looks like. That is precisely what a 360 walkthrough does, and it is the part a generic safety module can never deliver.
Workplaces that are far away. An offshore platform, a station in another country, an installation you cannot casually show to fifty people. The capture travels.
Recording a state. Before and after an overhaul, the situation ahead of a rebuild, the arrangement as it stood during an incident. That is useful outside training too.
Meetings about a place. An engineer in Rotterdam and a shift leader in Delfzijl looking at the same image demonstrably reach the same subject faster.
The limitation people underestimate
What you capture is fixed. That sounds obvious and the consequences are not.
You cannot change anything in a 360 capture. No opening a valve, no taking a component apart, no setting off an alarm to see what happens. Anything that requires a changing state drops out. For that you need a model, or a scenario, and that is a different order of magnitude.
There is a second limitation that bites harder in practice: the capture ages. Add a pipe or change the arrangement and the image no longer holds, and a recognisable image that no longer holds does more damage than a schematic drawing that is obviously a drawing. Put repeat captures into the planning, or accept that your material has a shelf life.
Photo or video
A 360 photo is a still point somebody looks around from. Several points linked together give a walkthrough, jumping from place to place. This is the form you want in practically every case: cheap, sharp, and you can hang information points in it that show explanation for whatever somebody points at.
A 360 video runs on and shows movement. That is attractive, and it is more laborious, heavier to stream, and harder to update: one change means filming again. Choose it only when movement is the message, on a walking route or a process sequence for instance.
What a capture day delivers
A practised capture is quick. An afternoon on site usually produces enough points for a full walkthrough of a defined area.
The work sits in the preparation and the post-production. Beforehand: which points you record, what must not appear in shot, who arranges access and the work permit. Afterwards: cleaning up, linking together, placing information points and writing the text that goes with them. That last part is content work and it is where the value sits.
The rule of thumb: if the point is that somebody recognises a place, 360 is practically always the cheapest route to that goal. If the point is that somebody rehearses an operation, it is the wrong form and it costs you twice.
Where this form fits into the broader choice of learning material is in the guide on setting up or renewing a corporate academy. The application it ends up in most often is site induction. For workplaces that lie far away, such as in offshore wind, the capture travels instead of the people.