Apr 12, 2011 13:15 GMT  ·  By

The front facing camera found on the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4 has allowed French scientists to conceive a few 3D applications that hint at new possibilities for playing video games, and watching movies on our mobile devices.

A demonstration video (embedded below) created by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay of the Laboratory of Informatics at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group shows how we will be able to watch 3D movies and play 3D games without having to mount anything to our heads.

“Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on mobile devices allows to create a glasses-free monocular 3D display,” the team explains. “It is based on a efficient head-tracker that uses the front-facing camera of the device.”

“We use an off-axis projection in order to adapt the perspective of the 3D scene according to the head's position of the user. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction,” their description reads.

The solution does not use the accelerometer found in Apple’s iDevices, but the camera, which tracks the user’s head through specially designed software.

Should this turn into an API that developers can use to apply 3D to their games, this might just change the ‘game’ literally, for everyone in the industry.

Unfortunately, the applications used to show off the amazing functionality are not available to the public yet.

In a video posted to YouTube in 2007, around the time when Nintendo’s Wii was making a splash, Johnny Chung Lee of the Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated how it was possible to create the illusion of a 3D image on a big screen TV using the Wii Remote, the Nintendo Wii sensor and special software.

One of his demo applications has been used by the folks at EHCI to illustrate how some objects appear to overlap others, or even reach out of the screen.