The 360 Panorama app from Occipital has been quite the popular app on iOS for a while. Now it has finally landed for Android users as well.
Apparently Occipital actually planned on releasing their app for Android smartphones first, but they ran into issues where their algorithms just couldn’t run fast enough on Android given the SDK at the time. They even documented their trials and tribulations trying to make the software work for Android on their blog. Actually, when 360 Panorama first came out for iOS, it was quite buggy and had pretty low quality, so much so that I didn’t really like using it. It is much improved now, of course.
But the past is the past. What matters now is that a very cool, easy way to shoot 360-degree panoramas is available for Android users as well! It’s similar to the sweep panorama mode that some Android apps already have (like the Galaxy Nexus, and even the Galaxy Tab devices). However, Occipital allows you to upload the panoramas to their site to share with others, making it into an interactive panorama that viewers can pan through, seeing the venue as you saw it when you shot the panorama. You can share panos directly from the app, either by e-mail (360 or flat pano), uploading to their site, or even to Twitter and Facebook.
Click here for an example of a 360-degree pano I shot when I visited Millennium Park in Chicago, IL, recently. The image quality is still kind of low, and in situations where lighting is less than optimal, like in the pano I shot, there is more ghosting and stitch errors. However, the ability to make an interactive panorama in less than a minute is still a very cool feature that kind of trumps Ultra-high image quality. You have to sacrifice a little quality to get the speed and convenience that 360 Panorama gets you. There are other panorama apps that make much higher-quality flat panos, if that’s what you prefer. It wasn’t too long ago that making interactive panos like this required a lot of time and patience mucking around with Quicktime VR software. You can use 360 Panorama on your smartphone! Ah, technology marches on.
Anyway, 360 Panorama is available now in the Android Market for $0.99 for Android devices running Gingerbread and up. Check it out, and upload some cool 360-degree panos. Let us know in the comments if you post up one you’re particularly proud of.
Via The Next Web
