Amazon Releases Fire Phone's Dynamic Perspective and Firefly SDKs

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Wednesday unveiled the first Fire Phone along with two new technologies - Dynamic Perspective and Firefly - which according to Bezos are the first such implementations on a smartphone.

Amazon has released both the Dynamic Perspective and Firefly SDKs to developers, and they can be downloaded from company's developers page.

Dynamic Perspective is a new sensor system introduced by Amazon that identifies the X, Y and Z coordinates to respond accordingly. Its capability of using user head movements (the way a user holds, views and moves the phone) makes it very interesting for developers as they can create whole new set of applications. As Amazon also detailed one app developer's efforts, saying "Zillow is using the Dynamic Perspective SDK to create the ability to zoom in on pictures within their app by just moving the phone closer to the user."

The Dynamic Perspective SDK also brings head tracking, motion controls, side panel, active widgets, and home screen APIs.

Amazon introduced as a Firefly as a key technology for its Fire Phone. Firefly brings the ability to scan and recognise any real world object, from CDs, to text, barcodes, QR codes, movies, TV shows, books, games, and more, just by using a dedicated Firefly hardware button on the side of the phone. The technology essentially uses the smartphone's camera, speaker and other sensors to identify various things. As of now the Firefly technology only supports Java-based applications. Amazon thinks that using this technology, developers can create more immersive experiences in their apps to increase user engagement.

"For example, iHeartRadio used the Firefly SDK's built-in music recognizer and music database to identify a song playing. Then they built their own Firefly action to create a station based on the song Firefly recognized," explains Amazon.

Developers with existing Android or HTML5 apps can determine their apps' compatibility by testing the app on Amazon's updated testing service page, and can get test results in 90 seconds. Registered free developers can see the look and feel of their app from support page, and get results in less than 6 hours.

Amazon also noted that the "apps and games submitted and approved by July 18 will be in the Amazon Appstore when Fire ships on July 25." Notably, Amazon is offering Fire promotions, where supporting developers will receive 500,000 Amazon Coins ($5,000) for each of their paid apps or apps with in-app purchases, to be distributed to users via promotions. Ad-supported apps will receive $6 CPM on interstitial ads in the months of August and September.