Review of iProject

Put a lower-case "i" in front of any word and it creates a name that sounds high tech. Alan Rorrison's iProject offers something of a card through window effect but it’s done with an iPhone or Android phone and not a real window in a house, car or building. This one looks good.

A card is freely selected by a spectator and signed, and a corner is then torn off. After the corner is laid onto the screen of an iPhone, you rub your hand across the screen and the corner is immediately seen to be under the glass of the phone. Spectators can rub the glass to make sure that the corner is actually underneath and the tear of the corner may be matched to the rest of the card. It is indeed the corner that’s apparently under the phone’s glass. At this point, the phone may be turned on and it’s shown that the phone operates normally. That is, any phone that has a corner of a playing card embedded into it.

With a rub of the hands, the corner is pulled from the phone and all is normal. The selection of the card is a free choice and the spectator tears off the corner. You can also borrow a phone and perform the effect with some requirements. There’s no “app” or download that you have to install on the phone. This is entirely physical with nothing electronic or software based and you’re employing a phone as is. This effect will also work with a business card or currency.

The effect requires a gimmick that you will need to make and a gimmick must be made for each specific phone that you either want to work with or borrow (each gimmick is dedicated for use with a specific phone). For example, with different style phones and even different color phones - i.e. black and white iPhones. To make the gimmick, you’ll have to purchase a special object that costs about $10 to $15. I checked online and they are readily available for purchase. There’s some work to make the gimmick, but it’s not difficult. All you need is a blade. Once you have the gimmick made, you can perform this one anytime.

I reviewed the DVD however this product is also available as a download. The DVD I reviewed had rather poor quality sound but I was able to get the essence. There’s also a second routine where it appears that you scratch a spectator’s phone and then immediately restore it. While the main iProject effect is an object to impossible place, the secondary effect is a destruction and restoration.

I was initially unimpressed with this effect as I was expecting an effect where a corner of the card somehow digitized and became part of the image on the screen. This is not that effect. But as a “card through glass” routine, I think it can be strong. I’m warming up to this one.

Thus far, I have been rather unimpressed with the iPhone effects that I have reviewed. iLogo is an effect where you move around the iPhone’s logo on the back of a phone. You can read my review here. "Virtual Magic Pro" offered a series of iPhone based tricks. In this collection, there were the usual vanish a coin into the software of the iPhone and card revelations and more. You can read my review here. When performing these types of effects with a smartphone, I find the devices so sophisticated that spectators automatically assume that the smartphone is making the magic happen and not the magician. And furthermore, people readily conclude that anyone with a smartphone and the right app can perform the learn and perform the effects. For these reasons, I avoid performing effects with my smartphone.