Cycloramic: App shoots 360 videos by making your phone dance

We cover a lot of apps on here, but Cycloramic is the most creative and cleverly designed one we’ve seen in a while. It’s an app that automatically shoots a 360 degree video panorama of wherever it’s set up.

How? By cleverly manipulating your iPhone 5 to make it dance.

Don’t believe us? Here’s video of Cycloramic at work:

Yes, it really is automatically rotating your iPhone 5 360 degrees to film a video. But how the hell does it pull that off?

Cycloramic makes use of two features on the iPhone 5, its vibrating feature and its various sensors to detect the orientation of the phone. Once you put your iPhone 5 in a standing position and press “Go”, the phone starts vibrating, and Cycloramic uses that data to continually shift the phone around.

The app is not absolutely perfect: You will need to take your phone out of its case and it will only work on a smooth, flat surface. But who cares? It’s an incredibly clever bit of programming that will actually be useful. And how often can you say that about an app?

Cycloramic [iTunes]