unsettlingly awesome iPhone X illusion will suck you into an infinite abyss of anxiety

a momentarily-inspired peder norrby used the game engine, ‘unity 3D’ to create this app, which, by the way, he’s going to publish for free on apple’s app store, under the name, ‘theparallaxview.’ like many well-executed illusions, this one — especially this one — is backed by techniques and processes that technology-muggles take for granted. 

all images courtesy of peder norrby

peder doesn’t leave things to magic: ’I’m using iPhone X with AR kit’s face tracking to perform head tracking in 3D, to find out the position of the eye, and render a view from there. so, basically here you can see the eye tracking that AR kit does. then I position a camera at that eye — the other eye should be closed, for best viewing — and I use an off-axis projection to get a correct render of that view, so it looks actually like objects are coming out of the screen, or going into the screen.’  app, source code, easy to follow video, fun GIFs — thanks for keeping us all in the loop, peder. it will be interesting to see where people take this. hopefully, during this one, you stayed in that magical sweet-spot between bored and anxious a little longer than usual.