How to take 360 degree photos on any Android Phone

With the popularity of VR and AR growing tremendously, and the craze for 360 Degree photos and videos are also getting popular on social media nowadays. However, in this article, we’ll be mainly focusing on how to take 360 Degree Photos from your smartphone. Moreover, for this to work you don’t need any expensive HTC RE 360, Samsung Gear 360 or a 360-degree Moto-mod, but if you have a Moto Z, you’re better served with it.

Moreover, for this to work you don’t need any expensive HTC RE 360, Samsung Gear 360 or a 360-degree Moto-mod, but if you have a Moto Z, you’re better served with it. But for all the budget and mid-range phone user’s it’s not always a better deal to grab onto one of these expensive accessories. So, there’s a software solution for this and comes from the camp of none other than Google itself.

The company earlier back in the days of Android Jellybean introduced Google photos sphere for its Google Plus social media network. But now with its new enhanced version, you’re better off now taking 360-degree photos than before.

What’s a 360 Degree picture anyway?

360image
Image Courtesy: StackOverflow .com

It’s a complete photo of in and around your surrounding captured and stitched together to form a sphere in which you can move inside the image to discover everything in and around you, sides way, up down anywhere you wish. Hence, the name 360-degree photos.

Another cool, thing to know about it, is that these 360-degree images are also used in visual effects as well as in game-engines to light-up the environment’s scene, and to get reflections from them. They’re often referred to as HDRI maps and usually are in 4K resolution or higher.

How to take 360-degree photos on any Android smartphone?

Google Camera app
Image of Google Camera Image Courtesy: : photography.tutsplus. com
  1. First, you need to download this app called Google Camera, which btw comes pre-installed on pixel devices. Download Google Camera APK
  2. Open the app, and tap on the three lines on the top(hamburger menu) to reveal the modes, and select Photo-sphere mode from that menu.
  3. Next up comes the fun part, in here what you have to do is, you’ll see a white ring and a blue circle, you need to follow the circle and make sure you keep the blue circle inside the ring.
  4. Once, you do it for the first time, move your camera’s position and follow the blue circle and hold it inside the white ring, and continue doing so until you’re finished capturing from all positions, and there’re no more dots to follow.
  5. After this is done, the app will start the stitching process, to create a 360-degree image of your captured pics from all angles
  6. You’ll be shown the stitched result, and you can move around inside it.

Some, OEMs have this feature built-in with their OEM provided camera app, so check for that, or you can always use, Google’s camera app and the photo-sphere feature inside it.

I am the chief editor of TheLeaker. I also maintain the backend stuff of the site. I’m a tech enthusiast and loves to do Python coding in my free time. I have worked at many giant publications like XDA Developers and NXTtech before starting TheLeaker.
You can get in touch with me at Garv[at]theleaker.com.

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