Instead of trying to first explain what the mess of words in the headline means, I’m going to direct you to watch this impressive video demonstration of how a 3D display is possible on the iPad 2 using the front facing camera:
Pretty neat, huh?
Would you be even more impressed if I revealed that the people responsible for this marvel are French? The research group is called the “Engineering Human-Computer Interaction Research Group,” one of 24 research teams at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory in France. (I certainly hope one of those other 24 research teams is dedicated to finding better names for their research groups. EHCIRG doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, you know.)
It’s all made possible by a technology called Head-Couple Perspective. According to the EHCIRG HCP is:
Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on mobile devices allows to create a glasses-free monocular 3D display. It is based on a efficient head-tracker that uses the front-facing camera of the device. We use an off-axis projection in order to adapt the perspective of the 3D scene according to the head’s position of the user. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction.
It all looks pretty cool for a demo, but time will tell if the technology will actually be put to practical use. Honestly, the “3D” app home screen in the video looks to be somewhat of a nightmare to actually use. The only use case I can think of right now off the top of my head would be a pretty sweet version of Tron for iOS. Let’s hope smarter people than me put the tech to good use.
Here is a demo of the iPhone 4 version of the technology:
via TUAW.
