New Google Widget Lets Android Users Embed Photo Spheres on Any Website
Late last year, Google one-upped Apple’s iOS 6 Panorama feature by bringing a special street view-style panorama app called “Photo Sphere” to Android 4.2. With the app, users can create 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed as both flat images and explorable street-view “spheres.”
The only real pitfall was the fact that you were extremely limited when it came to viewing them as “spheres,” the way there were meant to be viewed. Unless you were viewing the photo on the device you took it on, Google+ or Google Maps, you were given a standard, flat panorama. Well, we can now consider that problem solved thanks to Google’s new Photo Sphere Widget.
The widget, announced by Google yesterday afternoon, lets you embed fully functioning Photo Spheres on any website. Developed with help from photographer Colby Brown, he got to be the first to show off the widget on his personal blog, where you can now browse several of his gorgeous panoramas. Here’s what that widget looks like:
Instructions for installing the widget on your website are detailed on Google’s developer support page. The widget can be installed on any website with JavaScript in two steps.
You first add the following JavaScript resource to the website:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
Followed by the viewer widget code, which is embedded like so:
<g:panoembed imageurl="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/ -kr97Eucg6sM/UKGEuvo_eBI/ AAAAAAAAi0s/adq8uqyhm_k/photo.jpg" fullsize="4096,2048" croppedsize="4096,1380" offset="0,480" displaysize="600,400"/>
The widget will then use the JavaScript function to convert all the g:panoembed elements on the page into the interactive viewer — pretty straight forward. To get the detailed instructions from Google itself, visit the developer page by clicking here.
Photo Sphere is a very popular feature on Jelly Bean 4.2, so popular in fact that it was ported to earlier versions of Jelly Bean because people just didn’t want to wait for 4.2 when the app was first announced. Now that Google has made it possible to embed photo spheres on any website, we hope to see a lot more of the explorable panoramas popping up all over the place.
(via SlashGear)
Image credit: Stinson Beach boulders by MarkDoliner
