Fremantle: Parallax Background

Hello everyone.

Today I’d like to show you my idea about Fremantle desktop behaviour. As you remember, now it has cool feature called “Panorama desktop” that allows you to scroll through 4 different desktops with a simple flick of the finger. That idea is not something extraordinary or brand new but it’s really useful.

As for visualizing, Nokia has wisely chosen Android style with it’s neat effect called parallax scrolling.

Parallax scrolling is a special scrolling technique in computer graphics, seen first in the 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol. In this pseudo-3D technique, background images move by the “camera” slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D video game and adding to the immersion. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera technique used in traditional animation since the 1940s.

So, basically widgets are foreground objects and move a bit faster and background is, you know, background object and move slower.

For example I’ve made a small demo movie, that shows how it works (click image to view)

But since Android already uses it and we have a goal to showcase n900 incredible performance, I thought that it would be cool to add some more trickery to the background.