Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Desktops, Hardware, Rumors, Odds and ends, Apple, iPhone, App Store
Giant iPhone video is cool, but quite fake
This video is making the rounds lately -- on first glance, it looks someone running the iPhone OS on a Mac Pro with a 24" multitouch monitor. As you can see, everything more or less works as you'd expect, and therein lies the rub: anyone who's looked at it with a critical eye, including our friend and former TUAW-er CK Sample III, has pronounced it fake. I'd have to agree -- besides the fact that it comes from a visual effects house, the picture flipping at about :56 is a little bit off. How'd they do it? It's most likely just a movie running on a screen, with a guy pretending to control it. But even so, it's a compelling idea -- if you could find a multitouch monitor that worked like that and ran the iPhone OS with it, wouldn't it work exactly that way anyway?
I've actually brought up this idea before -- there is a ton of software running on the iPhone currently, and some of it is even better than the equivalent versions on the Mac. It would be extremely useful to port the iPhone's OS (and all of its software in the App Store) to another form, whether that be on your TV (I originally suggested a Wii-like interface) or on a multitouch input like this desktop. Apple has sunk a lot of work and design thought into this OS -- they may never do it, but it seems like it would be a terrific decision to bring some of that successful R&D back on to the TV or the desktop.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Sacha said 12:20PM on 6-16-2009
It's a DELL 24" screen from 3 or more years ago. No way it's a touch screen.
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JessicaAlba said 12:42PM on 6-16-2009
I guess if you had an actual touch screen on your computer, you could use something like interactiveiphone.com to simulate the iphone and it would produce similar results.
I don't know about installing other apps though.
oliver hart said 12:20PM on 6-16-2009
Still nifty looking. If they ever do port it, I want an iCoffeetable
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shaunisadirty said 12:43PM on 6-16-2009
It's called Microsoft Surface
oliver hart said 3:21PM on 6-16-2009
surface? LOLZ
i said if they port iPhone OS, not crummy surface.
microsoft surface coffee table assistant:
"it looks like you're trying to put your feet up, would you like help?"
KarlW said 3:58PM on 6-16-2009
They wouldn't need to port it: I think most C2D Macs (certainly a Mac Pro) could emulate the iPhone's ARM processor quite easily. It'd require a fair amount of hacking to write drivers for al the virtual devices, but I imagine it's certainly possible.
There's also the iPhone simulator, which runs Intel-compiled versions of the iPhone applications. Multitouch could be added by supporting the multitouch trackpad and location services could be supported by interfacing with Snow Leopard's Core Location. Developers could submit Intel versions of their Apps, accessible via an App Store running on the simulator.
oliver hart said 8:58PM on 6-16-2009
Interesting karl. I know they're porting debian to the iPhone, however you'd think if what you said was possible, we'd have heard something by now. I mean the iPhone os is 3 years old. A man can dream though..a man can dream
Johnny said 12:35PM on 6-16-2009
While it might be cool to play with, I'll stick with desktop OS X, thank you.
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jhogan said 12:53PM on 6-16-2009
Ummm....I have never seen a touch screen of that size with a built-in accelerometer, but I am sure this is real.
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Joel said 1:11PM on 6-16-2009
The thing that sticks out for me is how on my 3.5" iPod screen images get downscaled, sometimes too much. I find it hard to believe that on a screen, capable of 1920x1200 px, the JPEGS are not pixelated. I have no idea about the built in OS icons, but I presume they are small JPEGS not vectors as well...
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jonathan said 1:35PM on 6-16-2009
they are actually small png's
i would assume that if this is real, its not merely an iphone plugged into the monitor but an actual port of the iphone's OS running on a mac. so i would have to say, that depending on the photo ur looking at, this mac pro would be able to view larger resolution images with its nvidia graphics card.
that being said, the accelerometer switch is what made me think its fake. i've never heard of a monitor with accelerometer capabilities (but that could just be that i havent heard of it yet...not that it isnt possible). and to Sacha's point, it could very well be that shell, but not that monitor. it could be modded.
i honestly didnt see anything too 'off' at the :56 second mark. it actually reacted like the iphone always does to me the first photo i try to slide, it reacts slower, then all the subsequent images slide quickly....
Rich said 3:28PM on 6-16-2009
What makes you think they're using an accelerometer?
Monitors that rotate make their current orientation available to the machine. The iPhone software that controls rotation probably polls an accelerometer driver, rather than talking directly with the accelerometer. It doesn't make sense *not* to abstract it. So it would be a fairly straightforward hack to substitute the accelerometer driver for a monitor orientation driver.
I'm not saying it's not fake; just pointing out you don't know what you're talking about. That's all.
KarlW said 3:53PM on 6-16-2009
@Rich: No they don't. That would require an accelerometer.
Johnny said 4:08PM on 6-16-2009
Wait... What? Really, KarlW? Do you care to elaborate on how Rich is wrong?
He's not. Again, he isn't saying that's what they did here, but rotating monitors must make their orientation known to the graphics card so that it can send the properly oriented video signal.
Travis Walls said 6:00PM on 6-16-2009
"...but rotating monitors must make their orientation known to the graphics card so that it can send the properly oriented video signal."
Actually, most of the several hundred Dell monitors I've setup in the past (which look identical to what was used in this video, but I can't for the life of me see the Dell logo on the left side) rotate and communicate nothing to the video card. The user must manually select the screen rotation setting using the video card driver software. Several years ago, I did setup a Compaq/HP display that had a switch that would get tripped when the screen rotated and communicate back to the driver over a USB cable. It was no accelerometer by any means and it was pretty clunky, but it did the job.
Joel said 3:55PM on 6-16-2009
Thanks for clearing that up, however, I have seen a few monitors with tilt-switches (the accelerometer's younger brother). Less advanced, but does the almost same things.
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Andrew Harwood said 1:56PM on 6-16-2009
as much as I have a hard time believing that a monitor supports touch and tilt like this one, i want to believe it. If there is a monitor that supports touch like this one and is that thin with such an amazing DPI, I want one.
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Andrew Harwood said 2:00PM on 6-16-2009
and for some reason i have a hard time thinking it was a movie because I have a hard time thinking that this man timed things so perfectly to make it look real. But then again maybe he has the time to spend hours perfecting his timing to make it look like he is touching the screen and tilting.
One thing to think about is the fact that he also has the MAC login screen included as if the account he logs into is a iphone OS.
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dallasward007 said 2:07PM on 6-16-2009
If someone could get the iPhone OS to run on a MacPro, what would prevent such an enterprising individual from hooking up an accelerometer to the back of a touch screen?
The tilt thing does less to make me think this is fake than the multi-touch screen.
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jhogan said 3:17PM on 6-16-2009
You cannot just "hook-up" an accelerometer or "tilt-switch" to a monitor. One would have to reprogram the existing board and make it interact with the new hardware, not a simple task.