Okay, my first thought was “finally, they’ve figured out how to use the iPhone to power optic blasts!”, so I was ready to strap one on, grab the rest of the X-Men, and go take down known BlackBerry Storm user, Magneto.
Alas, turns out that while optic blasts didn’t make the final release, this new cable does support using the iPhone with a set of Vuzix 3D headgear. With more and more video making the leap to 3D, no doubt this opens the iPhone up to watching those leaps in even more realistic — and scarier — ways.
Not sure I’m ready to strap on a visor for my next plane trip though. How about you? Can’t wait for Monsters vs. Aliens or Avatar, or are you holding fast until they can just beam the stuff straight into your brain?
Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:
The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.
Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.
WebKit is Apple’s open source evolution of the old Linux Konquerer KHTML browser, and it forms the foundation of Safari on both the desktop and the iPhone (and Google Android, Palm Pre, Nokia tablets, etc.). Their Surfin’ Safari blog has just announced CSS animation support, but the better news (via MacRumors), is that iPhone (and iPod touch) Safari already supports both CSS animation and 3D.
Overly provocative headline not withstanding, and while this doesn’t address the ubiquity of Flash video, it should go a long way towards enabling more scalable and open interactivity on the web. (Flash sites don’t always scale well to small screens, after all).
Okay, I’m a web geek, I admit it, but is anyone else excited? Or do we just fear that it will all-too-quickly be perverted into iPhone optimized punch-the-monkey banner ads?
UPDATE: Our ace commenters point out this is something Google has been pushing for a while now, pre-2.1, although it may be slowly moving across the US and hasn’t been getting tons of attention everywhere yet. As the effect is likely part of the image downloads, Google can probably push new images any time they like, and not have it bound to any specific point release, so that makes the kind of sense that does. Still, pretty awesome feature!
Original post:
Eagle-eyed reader Gregory just sent this in and as Neo would surely say — WHOA!
Looks like for San Francisco, which is pretty much home turf for both Google and Apple, the built in iPhone Maps App now boasts 3D buildings! The renderings are in Map mode (Satellite and Hybrid modes have photographic buildings, after all!) and are pretty dang spiffy if you ask us.
Now, while I can see them if I search for San Fran, when I search for my hometown of Montreal, I get no such love. How about you and your city? Got 3D?
