Google’s Sprayscape App Offers a Virtual Reality Experience to Users


Google’s Android Experiments has led to the release of Sprayscape, an app that uses a VR camera experience to users. The app doesn’t have a real purpose, like most of the experimental apps that come out to display new technology with little or no purpose in the beginning iterations.

Sprayscape is an interesting app that combines picture taking and VR into a fun app.

The app uses a 360-degree sphere that is introduced with the phone’s gyroscope. Users simply point their phone, take the screen, and a spray paint-like experience is offered. Users will then compile these pictures into a VR cube where the receiver can view the entire event with a 360-degree experience.

Video is taken at 60 frames per second and then a texture is made with the camera feed. The 2D camera is then algorithmically made to project the images to a 360-degree sphere. A flat picture of the event is then transformed after it is shared.

The “scapes,” which are shared, will be pushed to a JavaScript web viewer that will then transform the flat image around a sphere. Users can move their device, pan in on the image and even tilt their device to view the images in the sphere.

The sphere starts off empty and is filled by the in-moment picture captures that the user takes.

Only frames that are tapped will be stored in the image and later turned into a sphere. This allows users to be creative and have greater control over the spheres they create.

While not a true VR app, Sprayscape is a lot of fun and brings new life to images.

The app is designed for Android and is currently available on the Google Play store. Shared scapes will be stored on Google Drive, and a Google Account is needed.