Categories: Mobile

Anyone can add 360-degree panoramas to Google Maps with Android 4.2’s new Photo Sphere feature

One of the most exciting feature announcements to come from yesterday’s Android 4.2 launch and Google’s new suite of Nexus devices is Photo Sphere, a feature that enables anyone to capture full 360-degree panoramas intuitively, which can then to added to Google Maps.

“Inspired by Street View”, Android 4.2 Jelly Bean’s new Camera app allows users to photograph an entire scene in every direction to create a 360-degree “immersive experience”. The images, or Photo Spheres, are stored as JPEGs and all the extra information required to view them in 360-degree format is stored as XML data attached to the images themselves.

Photo Spheres can be emailed and posted on Google+, but perhaps most importantly can be added to Google Maps to help make it more comprehensive and “enable other travelers to get an accurate preview of a location before they arrive”.

Blue circle icons denote user-contributed Photo Spheres on Google Maps for desktop only.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

Recent Posts

Building tomorrow’s creators: Inside a 9 year old’s AI education vision

According to a recent report by McKinsey, most organizations today are already experimenting with or…

6 hours ago

The push and pull: How and why the EU forced Apple to open iPhone app distribution (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

For more than a decade, launching an app on an iPhone meant playing by one…

1 day ago

Tony Colon brings decades of experience in customer innovation to the Senior Executive Board at Prezent 

Deloitte’s latest State of AI in the Enterprise, released in January of this year, captured…

2 days ago

Helogen’s HEL-IOS to turn Starlab into autonomous biomanufacturing hub in orbit 

As the space industry continues to expand, driving technological progress, economic growth and strategic advances,…

4 days ago

Macron, Sunak praise India’s digital identity, health ID schemes: India AI Impact Summit

French President Emmanuel Macron and former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praise India for its…

5 days ago

Voice is the next digital ID interface: India AI Impact Summit

Voice is the next digital ID interface for biometric liveness verification, following facial recognition, fingerprinting,…

5 days ago