Chapter 2. Dynamic Perspective

You think the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room when you’re staring at her? Just wait till you get a load of the lock screens that ship with the Fire phone, which feature a new technology Amazon calls Dynamic Perspective.

Note

In fact, it occurs to me that none of the lock screens that come with the Fire include human faces (no eyes looking out at you), which makes sense, as that would likely seem way too real and push them from the “Wow!” side of the amazement spectrum to the “Creepy!” side.

Dynamic Perspective is a kind of hyper-3D view that allows you to peek around objects in the foreground to see what’s behind them, all without requiring special glasses or anything more than your own eyes on your own face. Instead, it manages this feat by using four dedicated cameras on the front of the device (as discussed briefly in Hardware Features), which act as sensors to determine the user’s position relative to the image on the screen.

The effect is a pretty spectacular-looking shifting image, with depth and responsiveness unlike anything seen before on a consumer device.

Lock Screens

Though the potential applications for Dynamic Perspective in the hands of the independent developer community—Amazon has made its software development kit (SDK) and associated application programming interfaces (API) publicly available for that purpose—are exciting to think about, for now, the most visible and publicized implementation of this new technology is found ...

Get Fire Phone: Out of the Box now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.