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A new trend in mobile phone user interfaces, possibly started by Apple, but you never really know, is to have multiple home screens. Instead of being forced to pick the most important 3 or 4 shortcuts to put on a small, pixel constrained display, one can opt to have multiple virtual screens that a user can slide through and put whatever shortcut, and more recently interactive widget, they prefer to use on their device. The trouble with this new user interface is that it’s hard to find decent wallpaper. If your screen is basically one ultra wide photo, how do you make your background look pleasing to the eye?
A possible solution is to use something called “equirectangular” photos. Remember the globes you used to see in your history or geography class growing up as a kid? How do you view that same data on a 2 dimensional surface? Equirectangular projection was invented in the year 100 to solve that issue, and the same concept can be applied to photographs.
Mark Guim discovered this technique and made a tutorial on how one could utilize equirectangular images to create beautiful wallpaper photos. In this video you’ll see the technique he developed to make equirectangular photos work on the Nokia N900, but this can easily scale from Android devices which have only 3 home screens, to the HTC Hero which has seven.
About The Author
Stefan Constantinescu
Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.
