The iPhone 7 Plus camera offers many features not available on the standard 4.7-inch model, but now the popular third-party camera app, ProCam 4 is using the phone’s dual cameras in an innovative way to produce 3D-like images.
Known as ‘wigglegrams’ the images work by exploiting the slight difference in perspective between the phones two lenses to create a stereoscopic image. However, the iPhone doesn’t have a 3D display, so the stereoscopic effect is created by rapidly alternating between the left and right images, creating the illusion of a small amount of movement and tricking the brain into perceiving the image as 3D.
The effect isn’t new: you can find examples all over the web, such as this selection on Giphy, or on Instagram such as this selection by @3DNewYorker.
The app works with only a small amount of user intervention: when you click the shutter, you are presented with two overlapping photos displayed simultaneously on-screen. You then have to align them manually by dragging one image on top of the other until the main subject of your image is aligned in both pictures. This ensures that the subject of your wigglegram stays mostly still, while the background and other objects move from side-to-side as the wigglegram wiggles.
The app then gives you the option to save the wigglegram as a GIF, JPEG + GIF or as a Video + GIF, allowing you to share it on a variety of platforms while retaining the 3D illusion.
It’s a somewhat gimmicky effect, but it’s great to see developers innovating new ways to take advantage of the new iPhone 7 Plus cameras and makes me hopeful that Apple may itself come up with several new ways to use the dual cameras in the future.
Because it uses both cameras, you’ll need an iPhone 7 Plus to shoot these 3D photos, but it’s still a great app for users of other iPhones as ProCam does much more than generate wigglegrams. It’s one of the most fully-featured iOS photography apps available, supporting many professional features such as raw image capture, histograms, focus peaking, timelapses and slow shutter speed effects.
You can see a video of the wigglegram feature in action below, courtesy of 9To5 Mac:
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