Hear that buzz? It’s the sound of your eyes glazing over in the pasty radiance of light while the capacity of your ocular cavities is subjected to the era of 3-dimensional space upon the screen of a hand-held device. That sentence may have been slightly too long, but when you’re viewing 3D on a 2D screen, that makes it all ok. What else makes it ok? Head tracking. For that is the juice being used in the imminent release of an app developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay.
In conjunction with EHCI Research Group and the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, Jeremie and Laurence are pushing the iPad 2 front-facing camera into new 3D viewing territory. In the video below, you’ll see no direct interaction with the 3-dimensional objects, but hey, when you can move your head all over the place to spatially adjust your point of view, who needs interaction?
We track the head of the user with the front facing camera in order to create a glasses-free monocular 3D display. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction. It does not use the accelerometers and relies only on the front camera. The demo with the targets has been inspired by the work of Johnny Lee (YouTube) with a Wii remote.
According to DocteurCube, uploader of the video, “The app is coming on the App Store (waiting for review). It works on the iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G and of course iPad 2 (universal app). It will be free.”
via MacRumors
