Despite the cancellation of its grand event in New York City, Hurricane Sandy didn’t stop Google (GOOG) from dropping a bunch of new hardware on the tech world. The Nexus 4 smartphone, the Nexus 10 tablet and a more aggressively priced Nexus 7 (with 3G models) aside, an update to Jelly Bean slipped through the cracks in the form of Android 4.2. One of the coolest new features in Android 4.2 is Photo Sphere — a camera feature that lets you create panoramas from shots taken from any direction. Whereas iOS 6’s panorama mode lets you take photos by sweeping the camera from left to right, Photo Sphere lets you pick a central spot and then snap additional shots, above, below or left and right of the initial image. The software then magically transforms those shots into a smoothed out panorama. A video demonstration of how Photo Sphere works follows below.
