Ok, it may be a bit of a throwback experience to the 1950’s but there is a new iPhone application that just went on-line with a unique capability called "2D 3D Video Player," that delivers a "3D viewing experience" for the iPhone or iTouch. Think of this as an electronic version of the popular ViewMaster only you don’t have to stare into the binoculars to get the 3D effect.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

The technology places a primary image in the foreground layered over a background image. Then with a tilt of the phone, the accelerometer kicks in to add motion to both images in the X Y direction giving the sense of a 3D image in the palm of your hand. Tilting up or to the side changes the perspective on both the foreground and background images.

But there is more… Touch the screen and the image suddenly comes to life with the foreground section melting into the background in a somewhat choppy video experience. Frames progress with the object in motion within a 2D display then pop out again into this primary (foreground) / background state. The tilt experience stays, so even in motion, you can tilt up to see under the object, or to the side to see it from a somewhat different perspective.

According to the company web site, "…you are looking at the world’s first 3D video running on an ordinary handheld media player (patent pending). No 3D glasses required."

Insight Media had an e-mail exchange with the company’s principal Craig Summers who told us "…you will see tilting the iPod caused the viewpoint to change, so that you can look around foreground objects, while the video plays. There is no stereoscopic pop-out, since this is on an ordinary iPod with no 3D glasses and no optical overlay," he said.

Summers is an Apple alum, who focused on Quicktime VR (virtual reality) Authoring Studio and later went on to found the company, Motion Parallax, that among other things, tracks screen objects as they move using a "depth mapping" system that gives his application the tilt/perspective control-even while running video. "Hologram Controller" was the precursor to this new iPhone app, developed in 2005. Among other things it was an early gesture control camera tracking system that made first use of the depth tracking technology.

To call it a true AS-3D experience is a bit of a stretch, but we are talking about achieving visual perspective in both still images and motion video that changes with intuitive hand motion in an iPhone app-software. All done on a 3.5-inch diagonal wide screen display with 480 x 320 pixels at 163ppi, and perhaps even more remarkably, using a single 412MHz processor with 128MB (600MHz / 256MB for the 3GS). Imagine how game developers can use this technology to embed new aspects of a game within various visual (map) perspectives.

Summers told us, "It is also very well-suited to distributing 3D movie trailers to the public. They can see 3D depth information on stereoscopic displays in theaters and on the occasional autostereoscopic display. This is one of the few convenient ways to experience 3D outside of theaters particularly because ordinary video can be converted quickly for our 3D player, and it can be sent out at no cost worldwide to anyone with an ordinary iPhone or iPod Touch …" he said.

Got an iPhone? Give the 2D 3D app a try…and let us know what you think. - Steve Sechrist