Photonomie Lets You Chat in Real Time Using Immersive 360° Photos

The new Photonomie app wants you to “say goodbye to the rectangular photo,” at least where photo chat is concerned. With Photonomie, you can ditch the boring old rectangle and begin capturing & sharing immersive, interactive, 360° scenes with your friends in instead.

Inspired by the real-tie 360° image stitching algorithms used by the NASA on the Mars rover Opportunity, the creators of this interesting new app wanted to make something similar available to the general public. So while other photo chatting apps focus on decorating your photo with stickers or captions, Photonomie lets you capture something more immersive from the get-go.

Simply sweep your phone around (up and down, side to side, whatever you prefer) to capture the scene you want to share, and send it to a friend. The app will stitch your image together in real-time, no Internet connection required. When the friend you sent it to opens your “photonomie” in the app, they can explore it by sweeping their own phone around.

Check out this demo video to see the app in action:

The app only recently became available to the general public, and is completely free to download on the iTunes App Store. As long as you’re running iOS 9 or newer on an iPhone 4S or newer you should be good to go.

As for Android users, your version is “coming soon.”