Got Gyroscope Envy? The Perspectiverse Engine Might Just Cure It.
With the release of the iPhone 4 less than a week away, many readers are surely counting down the days until they can call Apple's most powerful pocketable device their own. The iPhone 4 boasts hardware enhancements that will allow for more sophisticated applications of every sort — but especially games. Its "Retina display" packs four times as many pixels as the current iPhone into a display of the same physical size, yielding a 326 pixels-per-inch, razor sharp display that makes jaggies a thing of the past. The 1GHz Apple A4 processor, which is currently used in the iPad, will allow for more complex games with improved physics and AI. And, finally, there's the gyroscope which will allow for incredibly accurate in-game motion tracking. During the WWDC 2010 keynote, we saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the new iPhone's gyroscopic capabilities in a Jenga -like demo app. It was an impressive display of motion-tracking tech that went beyond what we had previously seen from the iPhone. After all, accelerometers alone aren't up to that sort of challenge, are they? Developer Vishal Srivastava of Subversus Interactive might beg to differ. As TechCrunch reports , Srivastava, formerly with Microsoft, has created what he calls the "Perspectiverse Engine" that allows the iPhone 3GS and iPad to track motion in a fashion that yields seemingly impossible results from a device lacking actual gyroscope hardware. His system allows the user to manipulate their body in the physical world and see corresponding motion in the virtual world, making the iPhone or iPad feel quite like a window into that world. According to the developer, [The engine] uses a combination of device sensors to constantly align the game world with the real world
