Google has released Sprayscape, a "perfectly imperfect VR-ish camera app," from the Android Experiment Lab which promotes and support open-source coding projects. This particular software combines virtual reality with photography and allows users to create virtual and shareable "scapes" of their surroundings.
Google describes Sprayscape as a “quick hack using the phone’s gyroscope to take pictures on the inside of a 360-degree sphere.” Glenn Cochon, senior designer at Google Creative Lab, said in a Google Blog post that "we love virtual reality (VR). And we love taking pictures. So why not try smashing the two together?"
In practice, Sprayscape requires painting-like motions across the screen to create a final combined image. On the technical side, rendering the camera feed is handled by the device's GPU, along with the Google Cardboard SDK and gyroscope data from the NatCam Unity plugin. Check out the video below to see Sprayscape in action.
The Android Experiments page further explains that “when a user saves a scape, a flat panorama image is stored in the app data. When a user shares a scape, the three.js web viewer takes that flat image and wraps it to a sphere, making it navigable on mobile web.”
Sprayscape is currently free to download from the Google Play Store with the source code is available via GitHub. The app is currently only intended for use with Android devices and Google Cardboard.
Source: Google Blog
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