We recently took a trip to Florida and I saw this as an ideal opportunity to put Google’s Photosphere app for iOS through it’s paces. For those of you who have never heard of Google Maps, Google Street View or, more importantly Google Photosphere let me educate you.
Google Photosphere – Virtual Tour Photography on your Mobile Devices
Google Photosphere was first introduced as a new Android feature that was introduced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean which allows the user to take virtual tours and upload them to Google Maps or share them on their Google+ account. Google have since made the app available to iOS which means anyone with an iPhone or iPad can also join in the fun of taking virtual tours using their mobile devices.
The app makes use of the compass and gyroscope in the device in order to facilitate the taking of the images by superimposing orange circles on the viewfinder which you have to align your camera with to take the shots. Once you have taken a full 360 x 180 degree photoset, Photosphere then automatically stitches the photos together producing a spherical panoramic image which is viewable using the app or can be published to Google Maps.
The devices built in GPS aids with placing where the virtual tour was taken when publishing to Google Maps. Once published you can then share the virtual tour with your friends on your Google+ account or other social media streams.
There is a growing global community of Photosphere users already using the app and publishing their virtual tours to the Photosphere space on Google Maps.
Needless to say, however, we were happy to arrive back in Manchester 😉
If you would like to check out the rest of the Photosphere virtual tours we took then check out my photosphere profile.