Two-way video conferencing on iPhone made possible by an iPhone hack

The iPhone hackers have been great so far; busy releasing hacks to unlock iPhone from AT&T's clutches, get custom ringtones, change the background from the boring black, not to forget the games and applications to make your iPhone that much more special. This new ingenious iPhone hack will let you do two-way video conferencing with your iPhone, something I can bet you would have never thought of, atleast I hadn't.

Based on the placement on the iPhone camera at the back of the iPhone it is safe to assume that Apple does not intend to unlock a video conferencing feature atleast in this version of the iPhone. But, that has not stopped a couple of enterprising iPhone hackers from showcasing at the recent C-4 developer conference that it is possible to get video conferencing on the iPhone even with the camera at the back .

Inorder to workaround the placement of the camera, the hackers used the Huckleberry mirror, a periscope for MacBook or MacBook Pro which allowed you to film what's in front of you. As you would expect the Huckleberry mirror had to be customized to fit the iPhone.

To understand this better, see the image of the principle of the periscope (courtesy Wiki) below, it should give you an idea of how they manage to get your image on to the iPhone even though you are not in front of iPhone's camera (for the two-way video conferencing, you need to be seeing the other person on iPhone's screen so you will not be facing the camera). After the image is captured it is further re-oriented using custom software.

The periscope on the left uses mirrors at location "a" whereas the right uses prisms at "b". The observer is "c".

The image is then compressed and sent to a web server, where it’s relayed to another iPhone, thus resulting in a cool two-way video conference. The later part of the hack of compressing and sending it to the webserver was achieved by jailbreaking the iPhone then downloading and building the iPhone toolchain to write their custom piece of code for the user interface and to achieve the functionality mentioned above.

I am not surprised that their demo won first place for Iron Coder Live, they deserved it for a truly ingenious iPhone hack. Here is the link to the source code which they have only recently published in case you want to check it out.

However, if you are technically shy then It is still early days for the iPhone Hack and my advice would be to wait until a step by step guide is available for this one.

Update: Here is a link to the developers post to stay tuned on further developments on this iPhone Hack instead of downloading the source code at this point as it might not be very useful to you.

You can watch the YouTube video of the device in action below.

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