Everything Is Going 3-D, Even Mobile Image Capturing - Trimensional For iPhone 4 And 4G iPod Touch
January 9, 2011
PhloSoft is looking to pioneer a revolution, or so it would appear. Their new photography app, Trimensional, turns your iDevice with front-facing camera into a three-dimensional object scanner.
I played around with this for a number of hours. Trying plenty of different objects, colored lighting, distances, angles, and so on. My initial testing proved to be extremely promising. While the concept is no gimmick, it really does work, Trimensional doesn't succeed for everything or as simple as "point and shoot."
How does this nifty app work? The general method is detecting the intensity of light to calculate distance. With the glow of your iPhone's screen, the app uses the front-facing camera to capture the light reflecting off nearby objects. Actually, the app takes four quick photos, each with a different section of your iPhone's screen illuminated, allowing determination of light from different angles.
Once the data is acquired, Trimensional quickly renders a 3-D version of the object. Of course, this rendering isn't by any means perfect. Sometimes the object will look bloated, as if it's tearing, or even stretching. Done right, the results are still quite impressive, especially for an initial release.
For best results, choose an object that's matte, center the object on the screen, be sure the environment (even background) is as dark as possible, and try not to allow the object to move during capture. The biggest trick is lighting, namely distance from your iPhone's screen. You want the item to be lit fully but no overexposed areas. Reflections and excess light will result in extreme stretching of areas.
Each image capture is saved as a 180º 3-D model. You can spin models left or right, up to a 180º, when viewing them in Trimensional. If you want to share your masterpiece, you can share a standard 2-D photo through email or export it to your Camera Roll to be used in a different app.
Amongst just viewing the model from different angles, there are six different effects that can be utilized. Effects offer depicting the object as a 3-D wireframe, rendering it in polygons -- which seem to look the best to me, or create the model using distance points. These three rendering effects can be applied to colored texture models or you can go the, what I'll dub, CGI appearance route with only tones of gray.
Even though rendering is basically instant for the current version, I'd be more than willing to give up a little time for processing to have Retina quality models and exported images. Right now, the models are a bit pixelated and the saved JPEGs are only at 480x320.
PhloSoft includes five of their own models within the app for demonstration. Trimensional is compatible with iPhone 4 and 4G iPod touch running iOS 4.1 or later. Grab your copy in the App Store for a more than reasonable $.99.
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