FreezeTime3D is a way for you and a bunch of your friends to easily create the "bullet time" effect from The Matrix that you know so well.

• A computer running node.js that will act as the main controlling server. A Raspberry Pi is an ideal small, portable server. A pre-configured system image for the Pi will be added to this repo at a later date to make getting started easy.
• Any number of iOS and Android devices with rear-facing cameras. You probably want at least 24. Yes, you'll need a bunch of friends.

The "bullet time" effect is achieved by lining up a bunch of still cameras - usually pointing at the same thing - and having them take a picture at or very close to the same time when some event takes place. By playing the images back in order at a regular framerate, you create the effect of moving the camera through 3d space while time is frozen.

Most people don't have access to multiple still/video cameras to create this setup, let alone figuring out a way to get them all to fire at the same time. Most people these days do have smartphones with very good cameras on them. If a number of people got together with their smartphones, they'd just need a way to get the cameras to fire at the same time and collect the resulting photos.

Hence, FreezeTime3D was born. It consists of two main components: the node.js controlling server and a mobile app that can be run on Android. iOS implemented will be coming. At a high level, this is what the components do:

• The server acts as a socket server for all of the mobile devices to coordinate the pic-taking, aggregating the photos, as well as providing a small website to see the status of everything going on.
• The mobile app is run on every smartphone/device that connects to the socket server. The actual pic-taking is controlled by one device that acts as the "Master," while all the other instances of the running mobile app act as "PicTakers" in an ordered fashion.

"Bullet time" is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., so a different name was needed. FreezeTime3D seems to capture things well.