Photospheres

Well, my Moto X phone on Republic Wireless finally got its update to Google's latest version of Android, and now I can take Photospheres!

I've been playing around with it for a few days, but inside the house, where the walls are really close to the camera, the photo stitching wasn't working well - things were jagged and blurry. I looked around a bit, and came across this cheap phone mount:

And decided to build my own:

It's basically joist hanger, a cheap phone case and a bent wire hanger mounted on a tripod. It's arranged so the two axes of rotation pass through the camera lens, making the camera the exact center of the photosphere. And it works fairly well! Much better than doing it by hand, anyway.

I can't embed photospheres without uploading geo-tagged versions to Google's Maps app. And even if I wanted to do that (which I don't, not for interior photos), Google's terms of service don't allow interior photos. But! If you click this link, you should be able to open up my new public Photospheres album and rotate through the entire photosphere. I recommend it - it's a lot better than the flattened-out version above. Let me know in the comments if it doesn't work for you.