Sprayscape: A Perfectly Imperfect VR-ish Camera From the Android Experiments Project
Google’s Android Experiments project is a way for developers to create interesting and unique smartphone apps. Once approved, the app goes live on the Play Store, gets featured on Google’s Android Experiments website, and has its code open-sourced and published on GitHub. You can think of it as a proof of concept that Google encourages other developers to perfect and use in their own Android application or game.
The apps that Google features on the website can be from anyone, but this particular app was created by the Google Creative Lab. The developers describe it as a “perfectly imperfect VR-ish camera for capturing faces, places, and spaces,” and it’s a pretty interesting concept for those who like to play around with VR. It’s not an application that creates a typical 360-degree photo, but instead it’s a twist on that idea.
With the application open and running, anytime you tap on the screen an image is created. When you move the device around, the app uses the gyroscope to know where it’s been moved to and uses that new point for the next time an image is captured. So while you can use it to create a typical 360-degree photo (as long as nothing is moving in the scene), it can also be used to create some very trippy looking collages when you’re capturing images of moving objects.
You can even keep your finger or thumb pressed down on the screen while you move the phone around. Doing this will capture a stream of images that will be stitched together in this 360-degree image. Once the user saves the image, Sprayscape creates a flat panorama image of what was captured. When one of these images are shared, the three.js web viewer takes the images and wraps it into a sphere.
Be sure to check out the GitHub page here, and check out the demo video below to get a better idea as to how this app works.
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