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Hands-on with Android 4.2's Photo Sphere

Lars Rehm | Published: Nov 20, 2012 at 14:08:54 UTC 34
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Android 4.2's camera app lets you create a 360° Photos Sphere which is stitched together out of a large number of individual images.

Early last week Google started shipping the first of its new devices running Android 4.2 -- the Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 7 and 10 tablets. But Google also had a pleasant suprise for those of us who were not lucky enough to snatch one of the shiny new Nexus devices: the Android 4.2 update for last year's Nexus phone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and other compatible hardware, was made available on the same day.

Despite still sporting the 'Jelly Bean' label, Android 4.2 comes with a number of interesting updates such as  multi-user support, wireless streaming to HD TVs, auto-resizing widgets and gesture typing. However, from the photographer's point of view, the most interesting new feature is no doubt the Photo Sphere camera. We've installed Android 4.2 on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus and tried the new feature. Read on to find out how we got on.

User interface

Photo Sphere is very easy to use. After starting the camera app you select the Photo Sphere mode which sits alongside the panorama, still image and video modes that were already available in previous versions of the app. A small 'framing window' appears at the center of your screen. This is used to frame the first image of your -- at this point -- 'empty' sphere. Inside the frame you'll see a blue dot and a circle which need to be aligned for the first image to be captured.

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You'll see this screen when you choose the Photo Sphere mode in the camera app. As soon as you align the blue dot with the circle, the phone captures the first image.
More blue dots appear to indicate which frames to capture next to start building your Photo Sphere.
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Once the next picture is taken, the app starts creating a crude version of the sphere ...
so you get an idea what the final product will look like as you go along.

Once the first image has been taken, more blue dots appear above, below, left and right to indicate where you should to point your device to continue capturing the individual frames to create your sphere. Again, an image is taken as soon as the blue dot and the circle align, there is no need to press the shutter button. This process continues until the entire sphere around you has been covered. You can terminate early by tapping the shutter button and the app will start rendering the final image using the frames you have captured up to this point. However, you'll have to keep going until no more blue dots emerge on your screen in order to render a complete sphere.

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When you're finished capturing the invidual frames and no more blue dots appear, only two small areas at the 'poles' of your sphere remain uncovered. They'll appear as black circles in the sphere.
Once all blue dots have been aligned, you have to hit the shutter button to start the rendering process. This takes approximately 40 seconds on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

As you go along the individual images are stitched together in a rudimentary way. You can already move through the sphere by moving your phone around, but only in the final version will the app make an attempt to even out exposure differences between the inividual frames and correct for perspective errors.

The output image

On the 5MP Galaxy Nexus, you'll capture a 360° panoramic image using Photo Sphere with an approximate size of 4600 x 1600 pixels. As you can see in the sample below, the stitching is far from perfect with a number of stitching errors and 'vanishing' moving subjects. Exposure differences between two frames can cause some trouble, too. This is visible just below the bright reflection on the front of the left building.

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In the standard view the final sphere pretty much like any other panorama, you'll need to view it in the gallery app's Photo Sphere mode or on Google Plus to appreciate the 'immersive' experience.

However, like many panorama apps, Photo Sphere struggles most with moving subjects and image elements that are placed close to the camera. The rendition of the latter can be improved by rotating the device as much around its center point as possible when capturing the sphere images, without changing its position in space -- this is exactly what a panorama tripod head would do. Few photographers would think about using one of those with a smartphone, but you can definitely improve stitching quality with the right capturing technique.

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Stichting errors occur most frequently on objects that are close to the camera.
Like many panorama apps, Photo Sphere struggles with moving subjects in the frame.

Below you can see another sample sphere that was captured in a park, with most objects in the image further away from the phone's lens and no moving subjects. As you can see in the full-size version there are much fewer stitching errors in this sphere than in the one above.

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With most image elements at a distance from the lens and no moving subjects, this sample shows fewer stitching errors than the sample above.

Viewing the Photo Sphere

Of course looking at a Photo Sphere with a standard image viewer is only half the fun. Viewed in a dedicated sphere viewer you get the impression of being immersed into the scene and even moving within it. The easiest way to do that is on your phone. If you open a Photo Sphere in the Android 4.2 standard gallery app it is first displayed like any other image, but you can open the Photo Sphere viewer by tapping on the icon and then zoom in and out and 'move' through the scene using the familiar pinch and swipe gestures.

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If you open a sphere in the gallery app you have to tap on the sphere symbol at the bottom ...
and then you can view it in 'sphere mode' to get the full effect of your Photo Sphere.

When viewing a sphere in the Android gallery app you've also got the option to convert it into a 'Tiny Planet' image. When doing this you can adjust the zoom factor and apply the usual editing functions: filters, borders, cropping and tonal corrections. The Tiny Planet function is only available if you have captured an entire sphere. If you had your GPS swtitched on while capturing the sphere you can share it on Google Maps, too.

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You can convert your sphere into a 'Tiny Planet' image in the gallery app.

The easiest way to view your Photo Spheres on a computer is to upload them to your Google+ account. Click here and here to see our two samples from above on Google+. When viewing the latter, you'll also see that I missed one row of blue dots when capturing the sphere which results in the sphere not being 360° rotatable. This can actually happen quite easily, so make sure you've covered all blue dots in the capturing process before you hit the shutter button to render the sphere.

The new Android Photo Sphere feature is definitely fun to use and is a different way of capturing a scene, giving you an almost three-dimensional viewing experience. With Android 4.2 released just last week it'll take a while before Photo Sphere will arrive on most Android devices, but if you don't want to wait there are a number of third party 360° panorama apps available in the Google Play store, such as  360 Panorama or Photo 360° by Sfera. 


Follow Lars Rehm on Twitter  @larsrehm

Click here to discuss this app in our Android forum

 
TAGS
android camera feature photosphere
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Comments

Total comments: 34
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By Plastek (3 months ago)

Nokia Windows Phone got something like that ever since first release. No idea why the excitement.

0 upvotes
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By GURL (3 months ago)

The second example (blue sky, green grass and the sun) is stunning!

The main point for me is not about stitching errors but that the camera dynamic range is large enough to avoid the ugly result one usually get when the sun is included in the view. Any idea about that ?

0 upvotes
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By Michael Berg (3 months ago)

Funny with all these negative comments. When the 4.2 update arrived for my Nexus, this particular feature was the one that just blew me away, and I've been more than happy with the results. Come on, you now have a unique and remarkable technology that allows you to capture much more than just a snapshot, and something to wow your family, your friends or even your fellow tourists with. And it's not even in your camera, it's in your PHONE for crying out loud. Can't you just enjoy the update you just got, for FREE by the way?

0 upvotes
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By thinkfat (3 months ago)

I've seen it in action. It's not achieving quality results. A gimmick.

0 upvotes
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By Gregg Tavares (3 months ago)

As mentioned 360 has been around for a while and at least the iOS version is arguably better than PhotoSphere. Unfortunately the Android version is apparently not so good.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWIai0FzRgw

0 upvotes
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By Lars Rehm (3 months ago)

Well, yeah that app is mentioned at the end of the article. Photo Sphere is part of the standard Android OS though, not a 3rd party app.

0 upvotes
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By mehran langari (3 months ago)

its a very exiting highteq

0 upvotes
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By Combatmedic870 (3 months ago)

Hopefully soon, they was update it so it locks exposure.

2 upvotes
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By sodacan (3 months ago)

"Like many panorama apps, Photo Sphere struggles with moving subjects in the frame."

Uh, what on earth were you expecting when you shot that? That's a 100% user error and it did an excellent job at handling it.

6 upvotes
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By Lars Rehm (3 months ago)

How could it possibly have handled it worse?

Comment edited 12 seconds after posting
2 upvotes
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By drh681 (3 months ago)

It could have caught something coming out of the portal.

0 upvotes
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By aquadust (3 months ago)

Your results are strange indeed. I already saw several Photosphere pictures taken by new Nexus 4 and I have to say, it was almost perfectly stitched together.

1 upvote
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By Lars Rehm (3 months ago)

As I say in the article the stitching depends on many factors, the pano in the park is stitched much better then the one in the plaza. But what you see here is essentially what you get when you capture a sphere handheld as most users would do.

1 upvote
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By GURL (3 months ago)

"The stitching depends on many factors"

I suppose you are knowing but want not to explain there that the most important factor is not moving the camera lens between shots.

That is: for spherical panoramas you must shoot in all directions FROM THE VERY SAME POINT...

Fine hand-held 360*180 panos are possible but this needs some practice!. As a result not including the zenith nor the nadir was a wise idea but including less ground than sky in the view would have been preferable as this is often where large stitching errors are located.

Comment edited 2 times, last edit 9 minutes after posting
0 upvotes
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By panoviews (3 months ago)

maps.google.com/help/maps/businessphotos/

0 upvotes
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By gl2k (3 months ago)

It's like any other photo gimmick. After a couple of times it becomes boring.

3 upvotes
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By panoviews (3 months ago)

It's possible to use the spherical viewer of Google+ writing the Photo Sphere XMP tags (for example with Photoshop) into a stitched panorama image:

<rdf:Description rdf:about=""
xmlns:GPano="ns.google.com/photos/1.0/panorama/">
<GPano:UsePanoramaViewer>True</GPano:UsePanoramaViewer>
<GPano:ProjectionType>equirectangular</GPano:ProjectionType>
<GPano:CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels>4096</GPano:CroppedAreaImageWidthPixels>
<GPano:CroppedAreaImageHeightPixels>2048</GPano:CroppedAreaImageH

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