Case Study: How a Little Spinoff Propelled Us to the Top of Product Hunt
D P T H is an app for iOS to make 3D photos without a dual camera
The idea
At RoadAR we work primarily in transportation. We have a mobile dashcam app, which detects road signs and helps drivers not to break traffic laws. We have been developing it for a while and are gradually transforming it into a collection of HD maps for self-driving cars. To give you a brief explanation, the idea is to offer drivers a useful Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), so we’ve been accumulating hi-resolution always up-to-date maps for self-driving cars. This is what this technology looks like:
This technology is called SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). Please bear with our abundant use of terminology, but it would be hard to explain what we do without it. =) So to continue, when we do SLAM from just one camera, the algorithm is having hard time initializing and detecting the approximate distance to the objects, especially if this is happening at high speed on a highway. To solve this issue, we decided to use neural networks — a fascinating technology that has been rapidly evolving lately. In the end (but not without putting in some elbow grease!) we succeeded. Moreover, we were able to make it work on a smartphone. The initialization issue was solved, which allowed us to take another step forward in mapping crowdsourced from the community of drivers.
But once we got to really see our neural network’s effect on regular photos, we realized that we must share with the world our newly-created ability to obtain 3D images from a single picture taken by one camera. That’s how the idea for our D P T H (from the word “depth”) app was born.
The product
We decided to kick things off with one simple effect of depth of field based on the distance, i.e. that the image blur radius will depend on the distance from the focus point. This is what we got:
Not bad for the start! We analyzed the market and found several apps which do something to this effect on dual-camera iPhones — and here we are, doing the same thing with a single-camera phone. Then we realized that Android users also deserve access to our unique feature, so we started to simultaneously develop an app for this platform.
And now that we got into the swing of things, it only took us a couple of weeks of playing with the depth of field until we figured out how to make our awesome feature even more exciting. We saw that Facebook allows users to post 3D pics, so we’d be able to dramatically expand the number of our app users if we made the app available to the owners of older phones, including the army of Android fans. Here are the results of our first experiments with 3D (in fact, here we’re already starting to move pixels by distances predicted by the neural network in a real 3D space, and from there we can manipulate them however we want):
As soon as we finalized this feature we felt that things are about to really take off. However, along the way we found out the hard way that Facebook does not allow the upload of 3D images to any devices other than the dual-camera iPhones. We were quite upset about this setback but we’re hopeful that this situation will change soon enough. And then, of course, there are other services — for instance, Telegram — that will hopefully not just stand on the sidelines =)
ProductHunt
When we started receiving our friends’ and families’ feedback — namely, that we weren’t the only ones excited to play with bringing pictures to life — we started to contemplate the best way to launch our product. Of course we saw right away that our target audience is all over the world, and that the product should be marketed everywhere at once. And one of the most prominent means to promote a technology product is Product Hunt (PH). We have never launched anything through the platform, and there were plenty of unknowns to deal with. Gradually, having studied the launch manuals and guides, we have started grasping the basics. But, as we all know, information on the Internet can be quite misleading and conflicting — and partly this is due to the fact that Project Hunt changes regularly, and some of the rules or approaches cease being effective. Here are some of the key aspects which we were able to gather (as of March 2019):
- You can “hunt” your project yourself, but this appears less effective than going through the top hunters. It is hard to tell why — we simply don’t have enough information;
- The information that all subscribers of a particular hunter receive email notifications of the projects they “hunted” is outdated. Which means that there is no direct impact, although it is possible that their profile picture next to the Upvote button helps;
- Information that one cannot post direct links to the project’s page is nothing but a legend. This is clearly stated in the launch manual on PH’s website;
- The launch should be prepared well in advance; it is advisable to get in touch with the hunter a couple of weeks before the launch — otherwise they may not have free slots for the hunting, since only one project per day can be hunted;
- All materials to be published (images) have to also be prepared well in advance because there are many specifics and restrictions concerning your image and file size. This makes it particularly difficult to work with animated GIFs. We ended up learning a bunch of new and obscure words when we tried to compress our GIFs with a minimal loss of quality while maintaining high resolution.
We ended up making almost every imaginable mistake when preparing the materials and working with hunters — especially considering that we tried to find one the night before the launch. Unsurprisingly, we failed, nobody had any open slots. In the meantime, the iOS version of the app was already publicly available, so in order not to miss out on capitalizing on the newness factor we decided to take the plunge and do our own launch today, come hell or high water!
This is what our page looks like now:
As you can see, we reach #2 Product of the Day (see the medal in the right corner), and who knows how things would’ve panned out if we got in touch with a hunter in advance =) Nevertheless, top hunters started supporting us by midday, and it is possible that their profile pictures are already motivating the community.
And finally, here are several GIFs that demonstrate how the app actually works and links to downloads:
iOS version — download
Android (for now without 3D and a bit on the beta side) — download
And our page on Product Hunt — view
We welcome all your comments and suggestions on what other features you’d like to see in the app.
P.S. Post factum depth of field adjustments are not available even for the owners of the best dual-camera iPhones. So, dear readers who own these phones and think that this is not for you — don’t pass us by, we’ve got something that will be of interest even to you. =)
Originally published at vc.ru
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