Wild Adventure Corn Maze, since opening in 2010, has become a fall destination in Idaho Falls, Idaho. There are acres of farmland with corn planted in labyrinthine arrangements. There are more acres bursting with 25 varieties of sunflowers. There is a pumpkin patch, a rock climbing wall and a zip line.
Spinning in circles near those attractions, there is also a camera that captures visitors from all angles inside what’s known as a 360-degree photo booth.
Ryan Searle and his wife, Bethany, the owners of Wild Adventure Corn Maze, first rented one of the booths two years ago. Last year, they rented another. This year, they bought their own booth secondhand for $1,500 because photos taken at the farm had become a main reason many high school students, engaged couples and others visited, Mr. Searle said.
The setups, also called memory or selfie booths, typically have a platform with an attached arm holding a ring light and a smartphone or camera — think of a selfie stick — that spins around people capturing 360-degree footage as they vamp and pose.
This type of image-making emerged on red carpets at awards shows more than a decade ago as a way to show elaborate formal wear from every vantage point. Not long after, 360-degree photo booths started replacing their less mobile predecessors at lavish weddings and bat mitzvahs. At a Paris Olympics party this summer thrown by the watchmaker Omega, Cindy Crawford, her daughter, Kaia Gerber, and other stars mugged for the rotating camera.
The booths, cumbersome as they may be, have also started appearing en plein-air at places known for attracting visitors carrying cameras. That includes Wild Adventure Corn Maze and in New York City along the Brooklyn Bridge and on streets in Times Square, two areas where their presence has led to crackdowns on operators.
Vendors have set up 360-degree photo booths on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding Mojave Desert at the public art installation “Seven Magic Mountains,” a grouping of neon-colored boulders stacked amid the barren landscape.
Louella Sarabia, 41, and her husband paid $20 for 360 footage of them and their two children’s visit to “Seven Magic Mountains” in July. The booth at first struck Ms. Sarabia as awkward. “You’re in the middle of the desert,” she said, and it “is intervening in the scenic view.”
“But we tried it, and it was fun,” she continued. Ms. Sarabia, who runs an events company with her husband in Nottingham, Md., added that while she was familiar with the booths because of her job, she had never before used one outside an event setting.
Gabriela Kyeremateng, the lead singer of a Christian wedding band in Britain, encountered a 360-degree photo booth while strolling through the Trocadero esplanade in Paris on New Year’s Eve. Ms. Kyeremateng, 25, who had seen the booths while performing at wedding receptions, couldn’t resist paying 10 euros to step in front of the camera with an incandescent Eiffel Tower in the background. “It was glorious,” she said.
Visitors of the Batu Caves, a site of religious significance outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in recent years might have noticed a booth set up by a 140-foot-tall golden statue of the Hindu god Murugan. Another was also temporarily installed at the Maropeng visitor center, a museum in the Cradle of Humankind, the World Heritage Site in South Africa that is recognized for its plentiful supply of fossilized early human remains.
Lindiwe Mahlangu, 34, who works at the museum, helped bring the booth there last year after seeing one in action at a travel trade show in Durban, South Africa. It was originally set up in a gallery, where “it was doing very well,” Ms. Mahlangu said, but cramped the area. “We couldn’t accommodate all the kids as well as the machine.”
Its presence was somewhat jarring to Jasmin Sarwoko, a documentary filmmaker in Johannesburg, when she visited the museum late last year. “The Cradle is really an archaeologically important site,” Ms. Sarwoko, 33, said. The 360-degree photo booth “felt totally random,” she added. “Despite the randomness, it was actually quite popular with children, so I guess that was a positive?”
The booth’s style of self-portraiture reflects longstanding and newer trends associated with image-making, said Robin Kelsey, a photography historian and a chairman of Harvard University’s Committee on the Arts.
Like selfies, pictures taken at older photo booths and the daguerreotypes made before them, footage produced by a 360-degree setup is a form of “self-fashioning,” Mr. Kelsey said, a term that describes the way people have long used self-portraiture as a way to influence perceptions of themselves. “Self-fashioning before a camera has become particularly central to culture,” he said.
He added that 360-degree booths popping up at tourist destinations was indicative of how travel photography had evolved from people taking pictures of places to people taking pictures of themselves at places. He described that behavior as a way of individuals laying claim to sites they visited.
That imagery made using 360-degree booths is often set to lively music makes it even more enticing to take — and to share on social media, which contributes to what Mr. Kelsey characterized as “an ongoing, keen interest in virtual ways of experiencing the world.”
“What feels precarious, always, is the line between these virtual replications of the world and, well, reality,” he continued. “In recent years, it seems that culture is tilting toward a preference for occupying the virtual spaces.”
The device widely recognized for bringing 360-degree photo booths to the masses was introduced in 2015, about five years after the channel E!, as part of its televised red carpet broadcasts, started having celebrities stand on a rotating dais for cameras to capture every angle of their outfits.
The invention was conceived by Daniel Rosenberry, who at the time was in his early 20s and making videos of his attempts at extreme stunts for a YouTube series called JoyRiders. Mr. Rosenberry and his older brother, Jonathan, a videographer, had been documenting feats with a GoPro and other cameras, but none could capture certain stunts involving fire from a close vantage point and from all angles in one take, he said.
“We weren’t like, ‘Let’s make a photo booth,’” said Mr. Rosenberry, now 33, who recounted the product’s origin story on a video call last month from a sailboat, named Tippy No Flippy, on which he is currently living with his wife and baby son. An initial sketch of the machine by Mr. Rosenberry showed flames engulfing a stick figure standing on a platform with an arm.
With his father, Bob Rosenberry, who was working in the robotics department at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center before retiring, Mr. Rosenberry developed a prototype with items including a generator, a coffee can, scrap wood and several pulleys. That contraption, while unrefined and a bit wobbly, successfully took 360 footage of Mr. Rosenberry fire breathing.
His friend Adam Boussouf, who was involved with JoyRiders and had studied engineering with Mr. Rosenberry at the University of Maryland, later helped him file a patent for what they then called simply “the device.” It became the first product released by a company started by the Rosenberrys and Mr. Boussouf, which they named OrcaVue — a combination of the words “orbiting camera” and “vue,” or view in French.
It wasn’t long before people started requesting to have OrcaVue’s 360-degree photo booth at parties, Mr. Rosenberry said. “And then the brand activations found us,” he continued. “And you know what happened next.” (In June, Mr. Rosenberry sold his stake in OrcaVue for a six-figure sum, as he put it.)
The company’s booths, which start at $2,990, are now among several on the market. Some are sold at a fraction of the price.
Like most technology once considered novel, the 360-degree photo booth has also started to be edged out by another machine. Known as a Glambot, it has an arm that can be programmed to make any number of movements while holding a camera — not just spin in a circle.
OrcaVue released its Glambot this month, well after others started appearing in red carpet coverage on E! and at events like food festivals and movie premiere parties.
Further evidence of their rise: In the fourth season of “Emily in Paris,” released this year, the show’s titular, trend-obsessed character organizes a party for a newly launched perfume with contraptions that include a “glamera.”
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