Cycloramic iPhone App

Cycloramic is an iPhone app that allows users to take panoramic pictures. That alone would not make it a TIMD, there are many panoramic picture apps out there. However, the aspect that makes Cycloramic worthy of mention is the mechanism by which it takes the pictures.

Many similar apps have stands that rotate, or that make the person spin around to get the picture. Cycloramic has done something that I have never seen in a phone before. It uses the vibration of the phone itself to rotate it a perfect 360 degrees on any smooth surface. Limitations with the variety of surfaces aside, the idea of using only the vibrating motor to make a phone move in a predetermined pattern, without external mechanics of some kind,  is revolutionary.

Ideas that can come out of this would be things like iPhone pets that move across your coffee table or 3-D scanner apps that move around the object. The ability to harness the simple motor in the phone to get non-random motion is something that has limitless potential. Certainly, it may be much harder to get a phone to move in a path as opposed to rotate. But before Cycloramic it  had never been considered that it was possible to make the motion, caused by the ringer vibration, be precise at all.