A somewhat related feature I miss that Google dropped a while ago is Cardboard Camera.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.vr....
It basically took panoramas that also included a short clip of sound, which made for some fun "relive the moment" style picture/videos. It's a bit different from video, and was especially fun in the "turn your phone into a VR headset" short-lived experiment to teleport yourself back to a moment in time. They still work in Google Photos and there's still the little cardboard "VR" mode button to view them, although I imagine that'll silently disappear at some point.
Edit: As pointed out below, the Cardboard Camera functionality is in the official Google Camera panorama mode now (under settings when in that mode).
Example (not mine): https://www.google.com/maps/@49.0573911,-113.9034101,3a,75y,...
Interesting to note that panoramas in the latest Google Camera app still have the option to record audio.
You're right! I've never tapped the settings icon on the panorama view, but sure enough, there's a "audio recording" option. It's unfortunately a bit hidden and thus hard to decide on a case-by-case basis, but it's there.
This effectively replaces cardboard camera. Thanks for pointing that out!
Have you tried grabbing the apk from somewhere?
Oh - so official it won't install on any Android device I own?
Photo Sphere was great for posting to Facebook, which would allow users to pan around the image.
And I imagine some people were using it to post 360-degree panoramas to Google Maps.
It wasn't perfect, sure, but it was good enough. I don't know why they would remove this.
A photosphere was accurate no matter which part of the image you look at (bar any merging artifacts).
I took quite a lot in Central London and at my family home. On a later trip to my parents' rural village in India, I brought along a Google Cardboard and spent hours showing the villagers our life in London.
These are people who live very simple lives as farmers and farm hands. They don't know much about the outside world and their lives are very much dictated by the humdrum of life within their small communities. Using the headset was perhaps the only way these people would get a chance to stand outside if the Houses of Parliament, or get a panoramic view of London from Waterloo Bridge.
I know that VR videos exist, but the ease of being able to take photos at home and giving people a VR experience to show them how we live on the other side of the world was something very special. It's one of the experiences that really shaped my view on what technology could do and how it can really help people understand one another.
That same thing is possible today, but I'd probably need a 360 camera and a different VR headset since Google Cardboard and Daydream were discontinued.
Oh well, maybe I'll just keep using the pixel 6 pro for that. As others have noted, it's useful to upload panorama and photospheres to Google maps. Particularly for people who are sight or mobility limited, it may be their best option to virtually visit a space. Not that Google Earth isn't also useful, but people will happily crowd source images for places Google photo cars can't go. Google's "Street Trekker" program is done and even their own web page for uploading 360° imagery only references commercial cameras and not their own phones with Photosphere.
For a list of those tools, go to "Software using the Panorama Tools library" near 75% of the page. I've used Hugin in the past to stitch together some photos I took with my camera from a balcony to obtain a very large panorama picture.
I definitely didn't use it often but every time I did it came out pretty cool and without glitches or artifacts.
If your personal threat model warrants it, you might be better off with a feature phone instead - the attack surface on both Android and iOS are enormous.
