【Three Flavors of Panoramas】
1. Partial Panoramas that you know mainly from traditional landscape photography. They are created by stitching (assembling) of multiple normal photos together side-by-side, which creates a photo with much wider angle that would be possible with a normal lens.
2. Cylindrical panoramas are one notch higher than 360° photos which capture the whole field of view in all directions around the photographer. These are sometimes called cylindrical panoramas. They cover 360-degrees around but not up and down view. These are too created by stitching multiple photos together. The only real difference from partial panoramas is that you need to make sure the first and the last photos overlap. There are also so called "one shot" 360-degree lenses but they are by definition very low quality compared to the traditional stitched panoramas.
3.Spherical panoramas are the top of the line which not only capture the 360-degree field of view but in which you can also look up and down. They can even be taken in a way that you can't see the tripod nor the photographer's shadow in the picture.
参考：http://www.360cities.net/help/taking-panoramic-pictures/how-to-get-started
