looking glass - mobile phone timeline



what is it about?
the goal of this project was to use an external piece of hardware with the Unity engine. i decided to use a Looking Glass Portrait to make a looping demo showing various parts in the history of mobile phones and the way they have evolved over the years. never-ending demo videos that certain devices play to grab attention or show information were the main inspirations of this project, and i tried to keep things interesting by including animations that corresponded to each device (such as the monochrome snakes going across the screen when the Nokia 3310 is shown).

all of the animations in the timeline were done ‘by hand’ using coroutines in Unity, which was initially a bit of a challenge but quickly made sense and worked well for what i wanted to do with the holographic display.


on location


a section of the looping timeline, showing the Nokia 3310 and two pixelated snakes from the built-in Snake game, a well-loved feature from this and other Series 20 Nokia phones.
a video showing off the looping timeline and the holographic nature of the display. while the 2D elements remain unchanged, the 3D models’ perspectives shift depending on the angle and where the user looks at the display.
another section of the looping timeline, this example being from the iPhone 2G inside of its own iPhone OS 1 interface.

behind the scenes


an example of what the Unity section looked like under the hood. the 2D canvas elements are controlled by a point i can move around the scene for fine-tuning. a separate script controls how long to stay on a specific scene for, and then it loads the next scene, showing a different phone and gimmick.

©2026 isiah f