Google's Android Experiments platform is all about wacky ideas, and the company's own experimental app Sprayscape is nothing if not wacky. Using your smartphone's camera and gyroscope, the app lets you paint 'perfectly imperfect' VR-ish 360° photos.
Google is partnering with Mattel to reboot the iconic View-Master stereoscopic 3D photo viewing device. Instead of static photos with circular film reels, however, the new View-Master offers an immersive digital experience that puts people inside 360° "photospheres."
The launch of Android 4.2 in October of last year brought with it the ability to create special 360° panoramas called "Photo Spheres." But as cool as these panoramas were, there was no real way to share them with the exception of a widget Google released a few months back.
Yesterday, all of that changed when Google announced a brand new Google Maps website called Views, built from the ground up for the Android community and their many un-shared Photo Spheres.
Here's some good news for the smartphone photographers out there who are sick of all the iPhone-only news that seems to flow down the pipeline daily. It turns out that anybody with an Android 4.0 and later phone can install a copy of the superior Android 4.3 camera app without even having to root their phone.