Labs / June 18 2009
iPhone/iPod Viral Experiment
“It’s not fake – it’s technology!”
We created quite a buzz in the blogosphere with the movie on Youtube showing a Mac Pro running iPhone/iPod OS on a 24 inch multi-touch screen. Of course most people were convinced that it was fake, a spoof. And of course they where right.
We had initially planned to make a screen recording of the iPhone SDK but the animation was far too sloppy and the menu bar position got offset when applications closed down. So we decided to redo all the animations in Apple Shake with elements from the iPhone SDK screen recording. After some minor finishing touches in Photoshop, the movie was finally edited in Final Cut Pro.
As many have already seen, a Dell 24-screen in portrait mode with a covered logo was used in the experiment.
Stefan got a few minutes to practice the timing, before we started filming. Shooting was deliberately poor so that more people would believe that it was computer geeks only, and not film effects people. To increase the credibility even more, an error message was implemented as the home screen appears.
We’ve included all the materials used in the experiment below. Have fun!
Summary
What was the purpose of the experiment? We simply wanted to see how many hits we could generate during a given period of time by only using YouTube and Twitter as channels. Of course the idea was also to inspire developers and manufacturers to completely new uses of multi-touch.
Credits
Animation and filming: Eric Öhman
Photoshop and performer: Stefan Dahlqvist
Software
Apple Shake
Adobe Photoshop
Final Cut Pro 6
iShowU
iPhone Simulator
