Google has made virtual reality a little more social with the launch of ‘Sprayscape’, an app that lets Android users create surreal 360 degree collages with their smartphone’s camera.
The app, created by the companies experimental division Google Creative Lab, is available on the Android Experiments website.
Dubbed “a perfectly imperfect VR-ish camera” Sprayscape lets users capture 360-degree spherical photos by pointing their phones at the subject and tapping the screen to capture the frame.
The app allows users to “spray” photos — use their fingers to capture different parts of their environment. It doesn’t stitch photos together like a panorama, but rather places them on top of each other.
The difference compared to normal 360 camera apps is that Sprayscape makes no attempt to realistically stitch images together.
It reads data from your gyroscope to determine positioning, but doesn’t use any fancy algorithms to mesh images, which is how it’s able to work so fast.