Just in case you haven't yet heard, ngmoco has released Rolando 2 out into the App Store for the premium price of $9.99. The game's subtitled Quest for the Golden Orchid (in this one, you're rescuing a relic rather than a prince), and though it's not cheap by App Store standards, but on the other hand, it's as quality a game as you'll find on the iPhone. We were big fans of the first one, and the second one ups the ante with a brand new 3D look (though still the same great 2D gameplay), and lots more types of Rolandos to roll and jump and fly and drive around the more than 45 new levels. It's fair to say that if you liked the first one, you'll love this one, and if you've never tried rolling a Rolando around, this is a perfect opportunity to start.

There, unfortunately, no lite version of the second game yet, but there is a version of the first one to try, and there are lots of movies to watch over on ngmoco's site, so you can probably get the idea from there. If you're interested in gaming on the iPhone at all, Rolando's on the short list no matter what your tastes are.

3D photo apps are not new to the iPhone platform, but a new app from Juicy Bits looks promising in terms of making those pictures with depth a lot easier to take and view.

3D Camera 1.1 [US$1.99, click opens iTunes] is now available for iPhone OS 2.2 and 3.0 devices, and it lets you take photos that use one of three methods to create the illusion of 3D: red/cyan anaglyphs that require those funky 3D glasses, stereograms that create 3D images when your eyes look at them a certain way, and wiggle stereograms (or wiggle-grams) that use animated GIF images to provide the "depth". If you need a place to buy the goofy glasses, Juicy Bits lists several sources on their website

To take the photos, you use one of two methods. If you're planning on taking an anaglyph or sterogram, you take one picture, move the iPhone camera slightly to the right, and take another photo. To make a wiggle stereogram, you point directly at the same object from two slightly different vantage points. The app provides instructions on exactly how to take the two photos each time you launch it.

How are the results? Well, I haven't tried a red/cyan anaglyph yet, but if you use "crossviewing" (crossing the eyes slightly so that the two images overlap and form a third 3D image) you should be able to see depth in the test image seen below. If you use 3D Camera or any of the other 3D photo apps for iPhone, be sure to send some of your best pics to our Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/tuawrigs/pool/

They didn't just slap an S on the back and call it a day, you know. Apple has improved the 3D performance on the 3G S by including a more powerful graphics processor. According to John Casasanta, the speed increase is up to four times that of the 3G. But don't take his word or these OpenGL ES speed tests as proof -- check out the video and see for yourself.

On a related note, we hear that Apple has done "even more" than we can publicly disclose around speed improvements on the device. That could mean there are further software updates that may make the 3G S even faster. That's the kind of thing Apple loves to do, isn't it? Just look at the Snow Leopard marketing around it being lighter and more efficient. I've usually had (often temporary) system speed increases with updates as well, so here's hoping there's some unused horsepower under the hood just waiting to be unleashed.

See, now this is the kind of game I want from my iPhone -- the accelerometer isn't just a gimmick thrown in with the gameplay, it's the actual premise of the game. Diorama is a weird little Marble Madness-style maze game, but the catch here is that instead of just tilting the accelerometer to move the ball (which you do), the level of the game actually moves with you, so that you get a stereoscopic kind of effect, as if the stage is real inside your iPhone's screen. Tough to explain, but as soon as you see it above, you'll know what it's like. We've seen this kind of effect before in apps like MotionX's Dice roller, but in this case, it's actually part of the game -- you can only find the paths to take around the stages by actually tilting the device. And for extra 3D viewing, there's an actual 3D mode, so if you happen to have red and cyan glasses around, you can switch on the mode for anaglyphic 3D.

The app is the first iPhone release from a company called Drömsynt, and though the initial reports on iTunes say the game is pretty tough (it is a pain navigating the quickly-moving ball around those pathways), for just 99 cents, it's definitely worth downloading, if only to see how it works. So many apps just throw in a few iPhone-specific features as afterthoughts, but it's refreshing to see a game like this (or like Zen Bound, which really depends on the multitouch screen) rely on the originality of the hardware itself.

I admit it. I am a sucker for 3D. I loved 3D movies as a kid (and still do). I had 3D comic books, and a View-Master to look at 3D pictures of exotic locations far from my Midwest home.

Now, my iPhone can create pretty impressive 3D images, with just a few clicks. [App Store link] is U.S. $1.99 and easily earns a permanent place in my collection of useful apps. Unlike the 3D cameras of old, your iPhone only has one lens, so you get depth by taking a picture, moving about 2 inches to the right, and take another. The software guides you through taking the two images, and allows you to discard one or both of the pairs if you're not happy with them. TwinShot3D then creates an overlay of the two images, instructing you to drag one of the images so that part of the image in the background lines up. Then press the '3D' button, and you get an anaglyph image that can be viewed with standard red/blue 3d glasses. You probably have a few pair sitting around, and if not you are provided a link to get a free set, or you can buy as many as you need.

When you are done the pictures are saved to your camera roll, where they can be viewed right on your iPhone, or exported. You can even print them on a color printer, and get a photo that will work fine with the anaglyph glasses.

In my experience, the software worked quite well, and I was able to produce several images that had nice depth. You can experiment with the distance between the two images. More distance gives you an exaggerated 3D effect. Too much, and the illusion falls apart and the images can't be converged by the brain.

Version 1.0 of the software was reported to be pretty buggy, but the current version 1.01 is nice and solid. I had no surprises, freezes, or shut downs. If you are as hooked on all things 3D as I am, TwinShot3D is a lot of fun for the money.

Here's a link to view some 3D images taken with the camera. You'll need 3D glasses to view them, of course. Below is a gallery of some of my test images.

This one's impressive -- Zen Bound originally started out as Zen Bondage, a physics game/sandbox where the goal was to wrap a rope around a 3D shape or object. The game has just recently been ported to the iPhone, and in the process has actually been improved -- the graphics look sharper and the iPhone's multitouch controls really add to the tactile experience.

As a "game," it might be questionable -- it looks like there's a lot of fudging in terms of whether or not the rope has "covered" the object, and the scoring system itself is more or less tossed in as just a reason to get you to interact with the objects. But as an app, and a demonstration of the kinds of interactivity that can be exclusive to a device like the iPhone, it comes highly recommended.

Zen Bound is available on the App Store now for $4.99.

I've said in this space before that I'm not always an enthusiastic gamer, but lately some really cool games have appeared that use the iPhone's capabilities to the max.

A good example is First Contact [App Store link], a new game for the iPhone/iPod touch. The game is US $2.99 and certainly packs a few bucks worth of enjoyment and excitement. The scenario involves protecting your colonies on a distant planet from UFOs, incoming missiles and other dastardly space hardware.

The game is rendered in beautiful 3D and the inferface takes some cues from Google Earth. You can rotate your planet and zoom in or out with finger gestures. You'll need to be doing that, because the incoming nasties can hide behind your planet and you have to keep things moving to protect your colonies. You touch all the targets, and your defense system launches missiles to prevent them from finding their targets. Of course, as the game progresses, you'll be moving pretty fast to keep up with the increasing threat.

You can also shake your iPhone to detonate some screen clearing nukes, and you can post your high scores online to see how you are doing against other players.

A couple of small nits to pick: The instructions were quite hard to read. The text is too small. Another issue is that the pause button is on the lower right of the screen, and frequently while tapping to mark targets, I inadvertently paused the game. On the plus side, if you bail out of the game, you are given the option to resume from where you left off. You'll use that feature a lot, I suspect.

I think you'll get hooked on this game pretty quickly. The aliens get more numerous, and increasingly more aggressive. It's always a nice day when you can save a planet.

Here's some images from the game:

solidThinking demonstrated its flagship 3D rendering application (of the same name) that simplifies the process for conceptualizing, revising and rendering for industrial designers.

The application makes it very simple to start with a two-dimensional sketch and rapidly create a three-dimensional model of it. For instance, with two cross-sections, users can apply a contiguous skin to create a solid, and not just a series of disconnected surfaces. Users can dynamically edit the points that define the solid, as well, and solidThinking updates the object in real time.

solidThinking also features the Construction Tree, a history-like area that remembers changes to a file. With the Construction Tree, minor changes to the same model can be contained within one file, and retain the surfaces and textures for the modified object. Entire objects can be replaced as well, while surface and deformation settings are retained.

According to product specialist Darren Chilton, rendering is "stupid fast." A demonstration using a photorealistic model of a car took less than 30 seconds to render.

solidThinking is very much a product for professionals, though, with licenses starting at $5,495 for a single computer. A USB dongle that can be moved from computer to computer (including PCs) is $6,000, and a network license for workgroups is $7,495. But, for those professionals who demand efficiency from their software, solidThinking is a strong candidate for those who want a quick, high-quality 3D concepting app.

solidThinking is at booth 3320 in the North Hall at Macworld.

Around here, we used to call her "the unstoppable Erica Sadun" -- well, not to her face, but sometimes when she wasn't paying attention. The Queen of the iPhone Hackers has leveraged the undocumented video-out features in the iPhone 2.2 SDK, in cooperation with the clever folk at Freeverse Software, to produce the first playable demonstration of an iPhone game that displays on an external monitor. The one-off build of Moto Chaser plays best on a 2nd gen iPod touch (since it's got the fastest base hardware) and uses the device accelerometer for steering. On an HDTV, it outputs a respectable 20fps at 640x480.

Erica's post at Ars goes into the details of the work that Bruce Morrison and his team at Freeverse did to bring this custom build to rapid fruition, and it notes that this is in no way a product at this point; it's just a tech demo, although an impressive one. I had the opportunity to see this build in person earlier today at Freeverse's offices, and the surprising thing is how natural it seems to use the iPod touch as a game controller for big-screen play. With a less-intensive offering (a quiz or music guessing game would be ideal) and a design that takes advantage of the iPod's screen for simultaneous content display... well, I'd be game for that.

Video embedded in the 2nd half of the post. Check it out, and let us know what your dream game would be for a video-out setup from your iPhone or iPod touch.

This morning I took a stroll through the free bin in the App Store and found Earthscape [App Store link here] was, for a limited time, offered as a free download (it is now back to $4.99). I would pay a couple of bucks for Earthscape, although it isn't much more than a neat tech demo and didn't appear to serve any practical purpose. It is neat, but not essential.

The app is like a miniature version of Google Earth, minus street maps and not quite as "3D" or functional.

For a complete walkthrough of the app and its features, check the gallery.

If you thought the new Get a Mac ads were spot-on or funny, then you will definitely get a kick out of this. On Microsoft's Photosynth website, they admit something that we've known for years: They're not cool enough to run on Macs.

Side Effects is bringing Houdini, their professional 3D software, to OS X for the first time with the release of the Houdini 9.5 beta for OS X, Windows, and Linux. According to the company, Houdini "brings the 3D industry's first node-based workflow to the Mac ensuring that 3D artists can collaborate seamlessly in a multi-platform environment." This modeling and rendering platform has been used on a number of high profile projects like Spiderman 3 and Resident Evil: Extinction.

Houdini will come in four editions:

1. a free Apprentice edition for learning that includes watermarks
2. a non-watermarked Apprentice HD for $99
3. Houdini Escape "with modeling, animation, characters, lighting, rendering and compositing" for $1995
4. Houdini Master "with all of Escape's features plus particles and integrated dynamics such as rigid bodies, wire, cloth and fluids" for $7995.
   

Right now only the Apprentice and Apprentice HD editions are available for download, with the others expected July 15. Houdini is 64-bit Leopard-only.

Thanks eze!

CodeMorphic is offering a toolkit for iPhone app developers to display data using a real-time, manipulable globe.

They posted a video on their site, showing a possible application that displays composite satellite imagery, global temperatures, and a day/night terminator. Users can use standard multitouch gestures to zoom in and out, too.

The video just scratches the surface of what kind of data display apps are possible with the new iPhone SDK.

This one's been poking around since last week, but we haven't touched on it yet here on TUAW: Kingdom Lores is what looks to be a fully 3D, fantasy adventure game for the iPhone, and it looks hot. The game is being developed by Marco Giorgini, and uses a custom OpenGL rendering engine to let players do all the normal dungeon crawler stuff: kill monsters, run around, collect the loots, and generally be the fantasy hero. The game is available for download right now, though you do have to jailbreak the iPhone/iPod touch, and right now you've got to manually install the thing.

If you're not courageous enough to try and install it yourself (raises hand), there are a few videos available to show off how it plays, and while it is very clearly an early alpha, it does look like fun. Unfortunately, the chances that we'll see it in the App Store are about nil -- Giorgini doesn't even have a Mac, and he's doing it all using the Win toolchain.

Surely someone can get this guy a MacBook and a developer kit, right? Or at least get a port rolling? A year from now, we'll probably all be playing iPhone Spore and laughing at how primitive this looks, but right now, when it comes to running 3D on the iPhone, this is a dungeon we'd love to crawl.

There have been plenty of attempts at LCD glasses, iPod goggles, 3D eyewear, and even a hacked iPod cyborg model, but the Zeiss Cinemizer is a little different. First of all, if the name Zeiss looks familiar, it should be. That's Carl Zeiss, one of the most respected names in optics. The Cinemizer, as a result, has a pristine viewing experience, but perhaps more importantly, doesn't suffer from the front-heavy, nose-jamming weight you find on previous offerings.

The Cinemizer supports 3D (if the video is 3D to begin with), and has a battery/control system that's about as elegant as you're going to get with something you have to strap your iPod into. Check out the video as Mike puts it through the paces. Unfortunately our "mind's eye" adapter was in the shop, so you won't be seeing what Mike sees, but his description and facial contortions are hilarious ample enough.

(Video after the jump)