Do you remember the Glasses Free 3D on iPad 2 and iPhone 4 via Head Tracking Demo? If you don’t, no worries the video is embedded below, but in short, a research team came up an amazing tech demoes by combining head-tracking technology that uses the iPad’s front facing camera to deliver glasses-free 3D experience that doesn’t require the accelerometer, but it’s entirely based on the camera and the movements of a user’s head in front of the screen. The position of the user will give the illusion of tridimensional objects moving on the display. Now that team has released the free i3D app, so you can see the 3D illusion effect yourself.
Apps official description:
i3D is an overview of Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on iOS devices. HCP uses the front camera of the device to track the face of the user in real time. This information tells the app how the user is looking at the display. The app updates the perspective of the 3D scene accordingly, giving the user the illusion that he looks at a small window.
i3D contains several 3D scenes that you can observe with HCP. It only relies on face tracking. It does not use the accelerometers or the gyroscopes.
The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.
Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.
i3D has been developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG), University Joseph Fourier (UJF).
Here is the original video to watch it again: