Don’t hold you breath for a glasses-free 3D screen on the next iPhone, it would be very unlike-Apple to go with the tech many folks suspect is just a fad. If you’re a fan of 3D imagery, this nifty app will have you covered.
Panorama4D by OWLAB is a photography app that lets you take stereoscopic 3D images with your phone even though your device has a “dumb” 2D camera. Plus, you can slightly rotate around your subject on images bullet-time style by tilting your device. How does it work?
Simple, really. You just extend your arms and rotate to the left side until you hit the marker. The app will begin recording the video as you rotate to the opposite direction and stop when another marker is hit.
It will then analyze and align the individual frames to generate ten stereoscopic images of the subject at different angles.
There’s lot of number crunching involved in this step and if the app crashes due to fragmented memory, closing the running tasks and restarting the device will help.
When you’re ready to marvel your work in three dimensions, put on your anaglyphs glasses, choose 3D mode and enjoy. You can even chose the type of stereoscopic glasses in the app’s settings, go for a grayscale mode or enjoy your images in old school 2D. What sold me was the gyroscope 4D mode that rotates the view around your subject depending on how you tilt your device. This bullet-time-like effect is cool and provides a believable illusion of depth, but it takes a lot of practice to capture nice 4D shots and you may not be entirely satisfied with the results. Stereoscopic images look much better, but also require perfectly aligned shots.
Other features include Facebook, Twitter and email sharing, face detection that helps keep people in frame, auto flash, resolution presets (480-by-320 and 960-by-640) and cool CoverFlow-like image gallery. Available for two bucks in the App Store, Panorama 4D works on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, fourth-generation iPod Touch and iPad 2.
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