Category Archives: iPhone / iPad
iPad 2: Possible Glasses-Free 3D Experience
iPad 2 reaching new dimensions.
iPad 2 definitely has more advantages over its successful predecessor iPad, such as being lighter, faster, and having now also a front-facing camera which enables Facetime video-calling. Additionally, this front-facing camera provides the possibility to enjoy “glasses-free” 3D experience.
Jerome Francone and Laurence Nigay from the Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble, EHCI Research Group, have combined the iPad 2’s front-facing camera with head tracking technology to give the user an overall glasses-free monocular 3D display. The experience is “entirely based on the camera and the movements of a user’s head in from of the screen.”
“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.”
This means that iPad 2 users can view their screen as more of a 3D portal based on their viewpoint in looking at their iPad 2. Take a look at Francone and Nigay’s video here:
Head Tracking for iPad: Glasses-Free 3D Display
Francone and Nigay’s demo with targets was inspired by another tech enthusiast Johnny Lee, who demoed head tracking for desktop VR displays back in 1997 using a Wii remote and head-mounted sensor bar. Awesomely enough, Lee’s very informative head-tracking demo and his sincere request for Nintendo to step up its gaming to a 3D experience must have reached the ears of Nintendo, as Nintendo has since then created the Nintendo 3DS.
See Johnny Lee’s video here:
Pulse News Reader
Pulse is definitely one of the best looking, easy-to-use news / RSS readers I have come across! I have been using Pulse a while now and it really is great…throw away your newspapers, use Pulse!!
Some Features of Pulse:
- Browse and Read: With the Pulse dashboard layout, you can continue to browse news stories on Pulse as you read an article.
- Personalize Your News: You can select a “pack” to auto-populate an entire page with the top sources for your favourite news category such as politics, finance, sports and more. Pulse adds new content to the Featured section every Friday. You can also search for your favourite news sources by simple keywords.
- Organize Your News: Tailor your mobile news reading experience by selecting up to 60 news sources across five customizable pages. This new design is optimized for organizing and viewing sources on both phones and tablets. Moving sources between pages is as easy as drag and drop!
- Make it Social: Like, share and comment on items in your Facebook news feed from within Pulse. Easily browse social content from Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News (Y Combinator’s social news feed).
- Spread the Word: Found an interesting news article? Sharing a news story on Pulse to Facebook, Twitter and email is as easy as 2 taps.
- No internet? No problem. Pulse loads your news stories when you’re online, so you can read them later even when you’re offline.
- Import Your News: Pulse News allows you to directly import all your RSS feeds from Google Reader. Your read status is also synced between Pulse and Google Reader, whether online or offline.
- Stay Up To Date: Want to read the latest news as soon as it’s published? Tap to refresh news sources instantly without ever leaving the application.
Available for: Android | iPhone | iPad
Have a Windows 7 phone and looking for something similar? Try out Zen News Reader.
Install Android 2.2 Froyo on iPhone 2/3G
You can indeed install the latest version of Froyo, Android 2.2.1, on a jail-broken iPhone 2 or 3G, and you can do it all without a computer. Redmond Pie has put together a nice step-by-step guide to getting Android on your iPhone with Bootlace 2.1. It is as simple as installing Bootlace 2.1 from Cydia, running it, and firing up iDroid. The rest is done for you, and frankly, it seems incredibly user friendly.
Get your Android on by adding the repository “http://repo.neonkoala.co.uk” to Cydia, and jump on over to Redmond Pie for their blow-by-blow guide. Probably the most easiest way to install Android on an iPhone 2/3G is via iPhoDroid, but the problem with it is that you should have a computer to run the whole process of installing Android on your iPhone 2/3G. Now thanks to Bootlace 2.1, you can now install Android 2.2.1 Froyo on your jail-broken iPhone without needing to connect it to any PC or Mac!
Note: iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 models not yet supported.
Click here to visit the guide made by Redmond Pie.
