Photo Sphere on Android 4.3 improved for better alignment and stitching

Google doled out a rather minor update to the Android OS in terms of user-facing changes. But among the improvements in Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, there’s a supposedly better Photo Sphere experience.

Google’s Evan Rapoport writes in an official post that the team at Photo Sphere “worked incredibly hard for Android 4.3” to bring a bunch of improvements to the feature. First among these are improvements to the alignment and stitching feature that will give users more level horizons and lesser errors in the image. Simply put, users will come across lesser errors when capturing environments with a lot of moving objects in them, thereby making it less of a challenge. 

A sample Photo Sphere shot by Google’s Evan Rapport

Next up is improvements to the exposure compensation for every frame, to give a more evenly exposed final image. This was a very annoying problem when shooting Photo Spheres earlier and it would give an unevenly lit picture even when the light didn’t deviate too much. Rapoport elaborates here that users can compare shots produced thus to the earlier versions that featured “gray areas and inconsistent coloring in areas of high contrast (near the sun, horizons, buildings against blue sky, etc.).”

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The refreshed Nexus 7 will be the first device to get 4.3 out of the box, and other Nexus devices will be receiving the update OTA over the coming days. So, if you own the Nexus 7, Nexus 4, Nexus 10 or Galaxy Nexus, then the update should be hitting your device soon. The feature was first introduced to the camera app of Android 4.2. Photo Sphere enables users to take high resolution, 360-degree photographs on all axes, giving the pictures a look much like Google Street View.