Google Creative Lab unveiled a bizarre camera app for Android called Sprayscape. Presently, it is perhaps successfully perplexing first-time adopters because it is both confusing and disorienting.
In its introductory post, Sprayscape is described as something cooked out of Google's Android Experiments platform. The tech company is fascinated by virtual reality, and smartphone photography remains popular among the public today, so it cobbled the two together, resulting in the strange app.
"Sprayscape is a quick hack using the phone's gyroscope to take pictures on the inside of a 360-degree sphere," Google explained. "Just point your phone and tap the screen to spray faces, places, or anything else onto your canvas."
Everything in that statement sounds straightforward on paper, but that is not the case when a user actually begins using the app. The screen will be engulfed in black when it is opened. There are grid lines that sort of outline 3D space as well as tools and small toggles.
If the screen is tapped, the camera "sprays" an opening to the world around the user. Further experimentation, which entails a frustrating trial-and-error phase, led to discovering that keeping the finger on the screen keeps the spray continuous, finally unraveling the world around. It is analogous to spray painting except that rather than paint, the user is spraying reality on a spherical canvas.
To put it another way, one could imagine the experience as similar to being confined to a dark sphere. The app creates openings with each spray, and the saved "scape" lets other users experience the captured VR space.
It is still not clear what the app actually wants to accomplish or whether it could produce a usable image because it is so unwieldy and, as one user put it, really lacks precision. It is odd to classify it with apps that feature filters or lens such as Snapchat and Prisma. Google Creative Lab has opened a dedicated website where users could upload and share their "scapes." It will be interesting to find what others managed to produce with the app.
Presently, Sprayscape still has a number of bugs. A user will likely encounter hiccups when uploading and sharing their captured VR spaces. The user interface is also not that polished. For example, a tap triggers recording. But the check icon, which tells the camera that recording has ended, can still save a dark canvas even when no action has been taken.
For some users, Sprayscape could be fun. For others, it is a first peek at what virtual reality looks like. The diversity of impressions underscores why Google Creative Labs unleashed the device in the first place.
Sprayscape is meant to highlight the potential of Android Experiments. Google has been encouraging developers to use the platform in order to make innovative, open and creative products — those that challenge how people interact with their devices today.
