Turning Tokyo techno-cool with a quick and awesome smartphone camera trick【Videos, photos】

Even SoraNews24 headquarters looks amazing when it’s recast as a virtual computer realm.

Our Japanese-language reporter Go Hattori is a pretty big movie buff. For Go, though, it’s not enough to just watch movies, he wants to live them too.

In the past, that’s led Go to trick out his scooter to trick out his scooter to create a suitable war machine for his Mad Max: Fury Road-style life, and also to dress up as The Line Ranger’s faithful friend Tonto in a cosplay that was more memorable than the 2013 reboot film.

But Go has had a much more difficult time stepping into the world of Tron. Despite working on the Internet, his desire to the world around himself as a fantastic futurescape had been stymied until he stumbled across a fee iPhone photo app called Neon Camera.

Neon Camera modifies the images captured by your camera into a techno-stylish glowing wire frame motif. After firing it up, Go snapped a photo of his apartment, and after years of working on the Internet, finally felt like he was inside a computerized wonderland.

He got similarly amazing results when he took another photos during his walk to the office, which takes him past Tokyo’s Isetan Shinjuku department store.

The app itself only allows you to take still photos, but it works in real time, with the effect visible on your screen before you take the picture.

So Go figured out that by using his iPhone’s screen recorder function, he can create awesome videos showing Tokyo in a way it’s never been seen before, except in his imagination.

Viewed this way, the interior of SoraNews24 headquarters suddenly felt like a base of science fiction operations, instead of the den of twisted fantasy schemes that it actually is.

But the coolest results of all came when Go hopped on the train and pointed his camera’s lens out the window, creating this video.

Neon Camera (which can be found here) does a startlingly impressive job outlining the contours of your surroundings, right down to people who are standing in the shot. That’s not to say it’s a flawless product, as the app is on the glitchy side and prone to seizing up. As long as it’s not freezing, though, it’ll show you some very cool things.

Top image ©SoraNews24
Insert images: App Store, ©SoraNews24

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