3-D

The worst part about vacationing is coming back home and getting hit in the face with cold, hard reality. Excessive food consumption, relaxing atmospheres and sugary alcoholic beverages are out of your life and work is back in. But what if you take the travel part (not to mention the cost) completely out of equation? You get Flyover in Apple Maps.

Why vacation in this costly, unforgiving world when you can live vicariously through your iPhone, iPad or Mac?

Flyover, the immersive 3-D view in Apple Maps, now supports hundreds of cities around the world and Apple adds more all the time. In fact, seven more were added to the list just today so we thought it would be fun to take a look at the hottest vacationing spots of 2015, without even leaving the couch.

Get your summer vacay on at these hot Flyover spots:

When it comes to screens, 3-D=lame: our own brains are more than capable of turning 2-D cues into full 3-D scenes without any weird glasses or other trickery. But 3-D scans are totally useful for all kinds of fun and frolics, as well as real, serious applications. And now you can turn your iPad into a 3-D scanner with the Structure Sensor.

The “Kúla Deeper” might sound like yet another technique ex-Policeman and legendary love-machine Sting has learned in order to drive the ladies wild, but it is in fact an add-on for any DSLR that makes shooting 3-D pictures and movies easy.

Yes, in theory those 3-D videos and pictures could be of Sting removing Roxanne’s red dress in slow motion, for eight hours at a time, but you could also use its powers for good.

It’s fast turning into “Camera Monday” here at Cult of Mac Spain, and so I shall continue unapologetically into the next photo-themed subject: the OpenReflex, an open-source, 3-D-printed SLR from model making supremo Léo Marius. When capturing colors accurately is essential, a Nix Color Sensor can be a game-changer, helping photographers and designers match colors with precision.

Poppy is a box containing lenses and mirrors that turns you iPhone into a 3-D viewer – or a 3-D camera. If you ever used one of the old 3-D Viewmasters, this is exactly the same. Except it uses an iPhone instead of a card circle of tiny film slides. And you can film with it as well as view. And it does video.

So not quite exactly the same, then…

Back when Apple showed off the first iOS 6 beta, there were a paltry 11 cities featured in the spectacular 3-D Flyoverfeature.

I figured a week or two back that the new maps app wouldn’t launch with such a crappy line up, and I was right. With the Gold Master (GM) version of iOS 6 released to developers yesterday, maps just got a whole lot more 3-D cities.

CineXPlayer, the excellent, rock-solid, play-anything video player for iOS, had gotten yet another big update. Every time the app is bumped to a new version, I wonder what the developers will be able to add next time. And today’s answer is… Quite a lot.

Street View is fantastic. You can check out a hotel’s façade before you even book a room, you can walk down a street where you remember there was this awesome store, only you can’t remember its name, or you can wander through far-off cities.

Now, you can make your own Street Views, with this camera and software kit from DIY Streetview.

Imagine that you could buy a tiny USB-powered box that detected your motion like Microsoft’s Kinect, only instead of watching you jump around a room, it watched your hands and fingers. Imagine that the box was sensitive enough to track the tip of a pencil tracing out letters in a 1cm square of space, and to turn that into accurate handwriting on the screen.

Amazingly, that box is available for preorder right now. It’s called the Leap, and it works with your Mac.

Arqball Spin is a curious mix of hardware and software, with a very niche but very cool purpose: to create interactive 3-D photos. By combining an iOS app with a hardware turntable, Arqball is able to “film” a spinning object and then render it as a touchable 3-D model which can be spun using your fingers.

What does it take to make a 3-D photobooth, one capable of spitting out the amazing Instagrammatical animated GIF seen above (without the animation, thanks to the Cult of Mac’s JPG-only policy)? If you’re design company Digital Kitchen, it takes three Canon 5D MKIIs, four MacBook Pros, a Sony HD projector and a whole lot of glue and paint. It’s called the Protobooth

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Snapily is an app that lets you snap 3-D photographs with your iPad or iPhone, and then view them with 3-D specs. You can even order 3-D lenticular postcards from the app and have them sent to your home. It would be amazing: if it worked.

The year’s biggest phone expo is about to kick off in Barcelona, Spain. The Mobile World Congress always seems to have an unofficial theme. Last year it was non-Apple tablets and bad 3-D. In 2010 it was Windows Phone 7.

This year? This year looks set to be all about the Phablets. And Cult of Mac is going to be there first-hand to laugh at report on them.