4 ms·
It looks great, but didn't Amazon burn through $170 million for their Fire Phones with a 3D effect that consumers simply didn't care for? It's such a cool gimmi
by Apocryphon 2y ago
It looks great, but didn't Amazon burn through $170 million for their Fire Phones with a 3D effect that consumers simply didn't care for? It's such a cool gimmick that has absolutely no practical use (except on the Nintendo 3DS).
- inanutshellus 2y agoChicken/Egg problem for sure. Niche effect that Amazon had trouble encouraging app makers to build for (lots of effort for no users), and since there were no blockbuster apps, users didn't buy it.
- jhy 2y agoAnd it was only parallax pseudo-3D. It wasn't anything like the 3DS lenticular stereo effect. Four (!) head-tracking cameras on the front tried to understand where you were looking, and then the UI would shift about in response. There was no convincing 3D effect. The intention was that the UI would reveal extra info (like meta-data about a photo, or calendar details) when you shifted your head POV. Like a gesture that you could do one-handed while riding the bus. (But not discoverable, and twitchy, and tail-wagging-the-dog.) Given how coarse the tracking had to be so that the UI wasn't constantly shifting, it would have been far simpler and more energy efficient just to use the accelerometer instead of the fancy camera setup. And just use that for some nice parallax effects in the launcher; not as a core UI interaction.