Rounded corners? Pah! Amazon's '3D phone has eye-tracking tech' Amazon is reportedly planning to launch a smartphone with an active 3D display. It is claimed the device has been shown to developers in California ahead of an official unveiling in June, and that the tech will go on sale in September. The Wall Street Journal reports that the glasses-free 3D technology uses "retina" tracking, …
to an extent, yes. there is an effect applied which makes it look like the icons are sitting in front of the wallpaper, instead of stuck to it. As you move (tilt) the phone around, the icons stay fixed, but the wallpaper appears to move behind them.
Pretty, but pointless.
(bit like an iphone really)
>...the wallpaper appears to move behind them.
This is kind of a different league though, the background move tied to the gyro is a lot simpler than tracking eye movement. Particularly so if only one axis is used.
This (the background move a la iOS) is actually an easy trick to replicate in the browser. A couple lines of JS to tie the gyro to a CSS transition function on the background position(or use two layers for the icon so the effect is only on it - or whatever other object) and voila!
To be contrary, it sounds fully rotatable to me. The article mentions lenticular displays, which can't be rotated, but seems to say that the rumour is that Amazon will use a regular 2d panel and present the illusion of 3d through eye tracking. So the vector from the centre of the screen to the user's eyes is really all the phone calculates with; rotation doesn't matter.
It's the same thing as those c.2007 videos of the guy who reversed the Wii remote control (infrared sensors on his glasses, Wiimote static and pointed at him).
Has the Nintendo 3DS done all that well? I thought they'd brought out a non-3d version because it hadn't. And also to cater to the people who couldn't see the 3d effect.
I suppose 3d is most likely to take off in gaming. It seems to be on the wane a bit at the cinema (although I enjoyed it in 'Gravity'), and 3d tellies have not been the huge sellers the manufacturers hoped for.
As gimmicks go, it could do well to launch an Amazon phone that had a large emphasis on games. However my impression of Amazon's app store (from a friend who has a Kindle Fire) is that there's more tumbleweed in there than in Microsoft's mobile app store. The Fire works really well for Amazon because it's tied into the books, films and music content. An area where they're very strong. But apps is a major weakness, and it's hard to fix without users - but hard to get users without apps...
My other problem is that, in my opinion at least, 3d only works on big screens. I find the effect breaks down if my eye is forced to focus on both the 3d image, and the surroundings. So if I sit too far back in the cinema during a 3d film, my brain does this weird flip between seeing the 3d - then seeing the screen as a flat picture on the wall, then going back to seeing the 3d. Headache inducing. Whereas at the front, where the screen fills my visual field, I can stay in the 3d illusion. I don't know if that's just me though?
I own a 3DS, but the 3D effect stays off. It's all well and good so long as you look directly at the screen and don't move it. Only, it's a hand-held console, so small movements are inevitable. As such, the 3D effect pops in and out the whole time I use it, and that screws with my brain. Hopefully the eye-tracking tech works a bit better, but I'm yet to be convinced by any 3D tech I've seen (outside of an old plastic viewmaster, that is!).
I suffer from nystagmus (involuntary eye movements). So I suspect I can confuse eye-tracking tech - and make things look even worse.
However just because it doesn't work for me doesn't necessarily mean it's not a valuable piece of new tech, rather than a crappy old gimmick. I just happen to think that in this case it is a crappy old gimmick, even for people with the sight to appreciate it.
No, not just you IAS. In my case it depends on which side of the screen the effect is on -- on the left I get full 3D results -- if its off to my right it drops. Something to do with my "flat spot" on the right cornea .... At least for the sake of the 8 year old's entertainment I'm willing to suffer the headache, but I came to regret every single minute of Avatar 3d.
Grumpy old guy since I'm dealing with a chain of folks that don't want to own their roles today ....
Levente Szilesky,
My friend lives in sunny Blighty. And had said that he'd tried to install a couple of apps - presumably where he'd seen something that had an Android app - and they weren't available for Kindle. I'm aware he could sideload them - although I don't think he is.
A brief search suggests that the Kindle app store has about 1/5th the number of apps as Google. Which is pretty impressive. Although I don't know if there are many US only apps.
However given you can get a decent ASUS 7" Android tablet for under £100 - which will take all of Amazon's services I wouldn't recomment the Kindles. They're quite limited in some ways. And I suspect Amazon will do the same to any phone they sell. As for Windows Phone's app store being unloved, I'd imagine it's probably at a similar level to the Amazon one. And similarly lacking in the kind of apps for museums and companies, where they just knock-up an iPhone and mostly Android app.
Sure, if you want a pure Android device it's not the Kindle you want to go for - but if you are one of the ~20M people who enjoys Amazon Prime for a flat annual fee then a Kindle is a no-brainer, with its built-in direct access to Prime's vast movie/TV library etc AND it comes with a real app store.
All I was saying Amazon's app store effort is clearly second only to Google and Apple, the two giant platform owners, far ahead of everybody else (Blackberry, MSFT, Nokia et al); while you can find stuff you won't find there it is still fine for a regular users, not to mention that restrictions exist in Google's store, often inexplicably (an app shows up for one of our device, does not on another, despite both phones running the same Android version or the stupid 'tablet-only' limitations on apps and so on.)
Seereal technology have some tech for producing a pseudo holographic display. But you would need some way of turning an LCD or OLED display into a lightfield display. They proposed having tiny half oil filled cells in front of the pixels.
Whether anyone could make that work at a reasonable price in the near future is unknown.
I think this is more likely to turn up in VR headsets first. You don't have to go to a full light field — supposing mechanical latency were magically no problem you "just need to" track the eye's focus, undo it with an adjustable intermediate lens and then apply appropriate depth of field to the rendered image. So you're sort of cancelling the eye's attempt at focus and then pretending that it worked.
Inverted commas are there as per my expertise. How easy is it for us non-engineers to sit here and say "it doesn't sound hard to me"?
Samsung implemented eye tracking in one of its handsets (the S3? Maybe the S4?) albeit that they limited it to deciding whether to keep the screen awake and allowing implicit scrolling. It's not a huge leap from tracking the pupil to decide how to move 2d content around to tracking the pupil to decide how to move 3d content around, especially when you've already got handsets like Apple's that import a slightly more nuanced idea of interface depth than just plain z-order and use that in order to do very subtle 3d presentations (in that case in response to the gyroscope rather than to eye motion but you get the point).
Lots of discussion about revolutionary features that would reshape the tablet market. It wasn't anything special. If Amazon launches their very first phone with revolutionary technology that other phone makers have probably been researching and holding off on because it sounded better than it looked/worked, I expect to see a half-baked product that gets a lot of launch buzz but a lot of meh reviews and Android customers go back to buying Samsungs.
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