David O'Reilly, an animator and filmmaker, has created an iPhone application, iHologram, that acts as if it were a hologram. For now, it's just an animation of a little running cartoon cat from a film of his, but in the future, this could be how we message each other Princess Leia-style. The video of his successful application is under the jump, as is a less-than-convincing mock up of a hologram message...
The Future of Cell Phone Communication?
The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle of 35-45 degrees, as if looking down on the iPhone on a tabletop. The 3D scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis, a warped perspective, but updates dynamically using the iPhone’s built-in gyroscope to calculate rotation on the y-axis. In layman's terms: We can look around the video environment by turning the device (there are also controls for manual rotation with a slider on the left hand side of the screen).
A less successful hologram message:
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I was very excited about this when it first came out, as it would make for some amazing games. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any sense because if you've ever tried rotating your iPhone or iPod touch on a flat surface like that one, you'll know that the gyroscope doesn't pick that motion up.
view k4zzy's profile
what is this under in the app store?
view Matt. M's profile
Its fake, it was only a proof of concept rendering. Additional details are at: http://gizmodo.com/5041304/ihologram-3d-iphone-app-was-just-for-show-not-peek-into-alternate-world
view rlotz's profile
Haha, Star Wars was the first thing I thought about while beginning to read this. Bummer that it's a fake though, this has some potential to be a cool application in the future.
view www.CoolProducts.com's profile