Amazon officially announced its new smartphone, the Fire phone, on Wednesday. The announcement confirmed many of the rumors that surfaced previously, including 3D display technology and gesture controls.
The Fire phone's 3D technology, called "dynamic perspective," works differently than the type of 3D most people are familiar with. 3D TVs and Nintendo's 3DS work by projecting a slightly different image into each eye, creating a false sense of depth perception.
Amazon's Fire phone doesn't simulate depth perception. Instead, it uses four infrared sensors to track the position of the user's head. The phone then employs techniques similar to parallax scrolling to move the background in relation to the foreground. Parts of the image that are in the foreground move faster as the user's perspective changes, making them appear closer to the screen. The effect makes staring at the display more like looking through a window in supported apps, giving users the ability to tilt the phone to change their view.
The phone also uses the infrared cameras to enable more accurate gesture controls. Instead of tracking the movement of the phone using accelerometers, the Fire phone tracks the position of the user's head in relation to the phone. That means it doesn't matter how the phone is oriented to long as the screen is pointed at the user's face. Tilting the phone points the cameras away from the face in that direction, and the Fire phone registers this change and performs the appropriate action. Currently Amazon apps support scrolling by tilting the phone up or down and a quick tilt to the left or right can be used to change screens or open menus.
Amazon's Fire phone also includes a program called Firefly that allows users to find a product on Amazon with the push of a button.
"The Firefly button lets you identify printed web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, artwork, and over 100 million items, including songs, movies, TV shows, and products-and take action in seconds," says CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement.
With Firefly, a user could point the Fire phone's camera at a book cover and be shown that options for buying the Kindle e-book version, a hard copy on Amazon, or an audio book. Recording a few seconds of a song could provide a link to that song on Amazon's new Prime Music streaming service or the album's page on the website.
The Amazon Fire phone is currently only available on AT&T. It is priced at $199 with a contract, similar to comparable high-end smartphones like the iPhone or Galaxy S5. Without a contract, the phone's price is $649. Although it has not yet been officially announced, Amazon is rumored to be working on a cheaper version of the phone that will release sometime after the Fire phone launches July 25.
