App Of The Week

Friends, it’s been a month – and a busy one at that. WWDC, a stint on the exotic islands of New Zealand and Australia in the South Pacific, and a rather anticlimactic return to New York City and my APP OF THE WEEK column.

I actually do have some things to say about my travels, but I need a bit more time to distill my thoughts and do some photo-retouching before any of it is fit for official publication on the Isaac Schmidt blog.

This week’s app, beautiful in ingenuity and execution, is the amazing Trimensional.

The progression of 3D printing technology and a marked increase in the number of reported three dimensional printer sightings in New York has garnered my attention in recent months (not a particularly high bar of measure, admittedly). Yet the futuristic  predictions of on-demand in-home manufacturing,  doomsday tales foreboding the demise of the 99¢ store –  all pale in comparison to the amazement of witnessing a fully rendered three-dimensional image of one’s dog, captured with nothing more than the tiny embedded camera on an iPhone and this remarkable application.

Here’s how it works: Download and install the app. Close yourself in a dark room and launch the app with suitable subject matter roughly in front of the lens- it’s a one click process, probably best executed with your eyes closed if you happen to have chosen yourself as the unlucky first subject. In a matter of moments, you’ll experience flashes of light in various shades across your skin, and then, you’ll experience a stunning fully rendered three dimensional, rotatable image, more or less resembling a hybrid of yourself and ötzi-the-iceman after his final meal of ibex meat.