This article was published on October 12, 2016

Google’s new Sprayscape app lets you make trippy VR collages


Most of us don’t have a 360-degree camera, so tools like Google’s Street View photospheres come in handy. But the company is today launching a new VR app that takes turns the photosphere concept on its head into something… well, kind of trippy.

Called Sprayscape, the app comes from Google’s Android Experiments program, and basically just requires you to wave your phone around and tap to ‘spray’ a picture. Aim somewhere else, tap again, and repeat to complete the collage. You can also hold down on your screen to virtually spraypaint a wider area.

sprayscape-more

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.

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Once you’re done, you can view your sprayscapes by waving your phone around or pop your phone into a Cardboard headset for the full VR experience. You can also send a link or share directly onto Facebook.

Really, it looks like some developers got tired of trying to implement image stitching, got drunk, and then wondered what would happen if they decided to forego stiching altogether. The result is the trippy, oddly beautiful mess that is Sprayscape.

Well, except when it’s really creepy.

sprayscape-scary
*shudders*

You can download the app on the Google Play Store now, and it will be coming to iOS ‘soon.’

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