FIRE PHONE

Amazon introduced their new Fire Phone. A technology perk that tries to distinguish the Fire from any other phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” The cameras on the device tracks the position that you are holding the phone and the position of your head. My understanding is that any change in this head / device relationship triggers an analogous change in the image that you are viewing. Thus it appears to make the image more three dimensional thereby increasing the user sensory experience.

The presentation highlighted the limitations of the single vanishing point. That is, when you look at a Renaissance linear perspective from another angle, the image that you are looking at does not change. That is to say, the elements in the image maintain their static relationships to each other.

With the Fire Phone, moving the phone changes the image that you are looking at. So the virtual experience creates a dynamic in which it appears that you are moving around in the picture plane. The single vanishing point no longer applies.

Amazon has been working on this technology for 4 years. And it seems that this is a transformation of the linear perspective brought to an everyday appliance. Per the You Tube video of the presentation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w95kwXy_MOY at 40:51, the incorporation of a manipulable 3D image is interesting. It allows you to see more than one side of an object. You can gain multiple viewpoints of an object or building just by tilting your phone. I assume that Bezos believes that this more holistic 3D information is good. And really, this is all we are talking about at Transparent Drawing; see the whole object, multiple viewpoints, etc.

Technology will continue to completely envelop our lives and sensory experiences to the point that we may not be able to differentiate between an analogue and a digital input at some time in the future. Nevertheless, if we can just continue to pull out our pencil and paper, and draw, hopefully with transparency, we will continue to maintain our increasingly slippery grip on analogue reality.