iClouds Lite

by Eric March on November 6, 2008 at 10:34 am

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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App Name: iClouds Lite
Developer: Studio-Kura
Category: Entertainment

I’ll admit, when I saw the screenshot in the App Store and then saw the small size of the app, I thought “This is either a cheap, short looped-video or maybe, just maybe, it’s OpenGL 3G and it’ll look as awesome as the screenshot makes it.”

Well, it wasn’t either as it turns out. It is perhaps not quite as good as I had hoped, but it was far better than my cynical ass was expecting.  It portrays a scene of you floating forward through the clouds in the first person– and it’s smooth.  If you don’t analyze it too closely you’d swear they managed to fit a perfectly looping, high quality yet compact video or incredibly realistic 3D rendering in there.  The effect is pretty impressive to look at.

But whenever I see something like this the analytical part of my brain kicks in and demands that I figure out how it’s done, so now I’m going to spoil the magic trick for you by explaining it.  If you’d rather not know, skip to the next paragraph.  It’s not 3D; the clouds are not volumetric. (It may use OpenGL-ES, but not to render the clouds.) It’s not a video; it’s far too smooth and loops too seamlessly.  In fact, this app consists of exactly 7 pre-rendered images: The background with the sun, and 6 flat images of clouds that it smoothly zooms toward you in parallax, fading each out as it passes the “camera”.  But the zooms, transitions, and opacity of the clouds are so smooth and realistic that the overall effect is quite stunning.

In fact, even despite knowing how it’s done it still doesn’t spoil the effect all that much.  And y’know what?  That’s a sign of good magic: Being able to explain how it’s done and still wowing the audience with it.  Granted, this app doesn’t actually do anything, and this lite version isn’t interactive nor does it contain any configurable settings, but it does do a very good job of stumping for the $0.99 full version in that picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words kind of way.

The full version contains two additional scenes (evening and nighttime), adjustable speed, and interactive features such as being able to drag or tilt to bank through the clouds.  Pity the lite version doesn’t have those interactive features, as I’d like to see if those are done well, too.

Regardless, even as a non-interactive toy, iClouds still provides you with a lovely Zen-like experience.  Just add some chillout tunes.

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Posted in Entertainment