We have our idea, or so we think for now.
Our intentions for the product have changed slightly, but they still focus on reminding people of past events and memories, while simultaneously making people more aware of the amount and quality of photos they take.
Due to the largest contributor to masses of photos being down to smartphones, what better way to tackle it than from inside. Trojan horse style. Just without the attacking/hacking and the destruction. More like a Trojan shetland pony, it’s a little less scary, but more fun and kind.
Sketchbook diagram of the basic App and Product function.
We’re primarily designing an app. Along with a tie in product to further the experience.
The App
Our app will go through your phone and it will select a photo at random, potentially using a customisable AI. Allowing you to select what you want to be chosen out of your camera roll; people, places, events, pets, etc.
Facial recognition is getting scarily good recently so it shouldn’t be too hard. There’s already systems in development to recognise humorous photos. Scary.
How hard could it be to harness facial recognition and ways to distinguish other photos without faces…?
With said chosen photo, it will remind you that you have it with a little notification on your phone. (The timeframes for how often and when you want photos to be selected will be customisable in the settings, to tailor to how many photos you take.)
You will be taken to the app where you can decide what to do with it. The options will be along the lines of:
- Share your photo; send it to a friend/contact, perhaps share to social media
- You can skip the photo, if it’s terrible and you do not want to be reminded of it, however the skips would be limited. (causing you to consider how many pointless photos you would want to have on your phone)
- Finally, to display your photo – either changing your phone background to a temporary/ permanent one. Or to send it to the tie-in product.
The Product
It will allows you to display your photos on a digital screen, similar to a digital photo frame, one that will be connected through wifi or similar means, perhaps to your account for the app.
The frame will (ideally) adjust itself from portrait and landscape positions according to the photo display, and will work wall mounted or sat independently. Additionally the frame will have a small printer build into the back of it, that, should you like the image enough you can press the button from the display to then print your image, in a very polariod-esque fashion.
We would use the same technology we investigated in our previous idea, a ZINK (zero ink) paper, with a small digital, adjusted, pocket printer. essentially a bluetooth Polaroid printer but vamped up a bit. We’d scale up the printer from the existing product technology to deliver slightly larger photos.
ZINK Printer
That’s pretty much our idea as of yet. Currently we are in the development of a look, to get started with developing the branding, the app’s UI and the aesthetic for the photo frame too. Allowing us to challenge the norms and aesthetics of app and product design.
We’re pretty excited to get working on this and to finally get stuck in.
Future Cameras 