The Future of Cell Phone Communication?

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 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:

Comments (4)

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.

posted by k4zzy on October 17th 2008 at 11:52am
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what is this under in the app store?

posted by Matt. M on October 17th 2008 at 1:29pm
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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

posted by rlotz on October 17th 2008 at 1:30pm
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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.

posted by www.CoolProducts.com on October 20th 2008 at 4:41am
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