The hip hop festival prototype & the holy shit moment
For more info on this technology check out SLICE ENGINE
Camera Slice, Inc
Before we get into the selfie’s and a bunch of animated GIF’s. Let’s talk business. I started Camera Slice, Inc with a few founders in February of 2014 (c-corp for those interested). The goal was to build a product that could connect a single moment in time. Mission complete. Here’s the more on that story, lessons learned and what happened next.
We took our prototype and kindly asked the awesome people at Rhymesayers Entertainment via Skye Rossi if we could test it out in real-time at Soundset 2014. Rhymesayers Entertainment is very open to new technology and how that tech interacts with their fans. #madProps to #Rhymesayers — they gave us our first shot and it was awesome. 14 gigs of photo data was collected with 5 devices in a short period of time.
What’s Soundset? Watch the wrap up video from 2014. Simply said its a #badass hip hop festival.
Our engineer 'Electric' Joel took our original prototype from the night before and added new features throughout the day. Joel added code that allowed whomever pushed the button first to do a burst shot if so desired — even selfie bursts. Note at that time a burst shot was not available in iOS7 for iPhone5 or iPhone4. We even added the ability to change the number of shots taken. Follow me on this… I push “the button” on my device that is sync’d to 5 other devices which forces those devices to take a picture at whatever the settings I have set on my device. Its like a glorified remote control with burst mode.
Watch the original prototype video one more time.
This is where all the magic happened — in the production trailer. We took notes on what was happening all around us. We watched the social media team taking content from the professional photographers and pushing that content out the large display screens… hmm. Interesting. That process wasn’t very fast but the quality was hand picked and looked incredible.
We’ll come back to this finding at the end of the story. Check out the lessons learned at the bottom of the post.
Quick selfie. I think I won for best nerd duck lips. What do you think? :) #highFive to Eric Melzer for taking professional shots.
Each shot taken from each device. Note the crossover shots that make the syncing more realistic. Yep, it works. What about action shots? Let’s take a look a break dancing and some skateboarding. At time of watching the skateboarders we realized that a single shot wasn’t working very well. The action is too fast and we need to catch a skateboarder in the air! That’s when we added the burst shot — guaranteed to catch the perfect moment.
The burst shot in action from multiple views. #holyshit that’s cool. This was my favorite part of the festival. You could feel the emotion…that beat hitting your chest. Noticed the bright orange figures in the shots — each holding their positions.
Interesting grab of a multi-view shot of skateboarders. I hope Red Bull is checking this out. Its cheaper than using GoPro’s.
Alright let’s get nerdy. This should mess with your head a bit when it comes to time syncing. Notice the letters placed in each of the photos. That’s the time crossover shot I mentioned earlier in the selfie (groupie) shot. #mindBlown
Multi-shot selfie. I think its official now, its a groupie. Wait. Multi-player selfie?
Leave a comment a tell me what you think it should be called?
What about live events with hip hop rockstars like Atmosphere?
Who will be the first to take the first synchronized festival shot with thousands of fans?
The holy shit moment.
Even the most mundane shot, let’s say the shot of the crowd, was impactful because of the link to other shots that sync’d. Not a real big deal but the idea that every shot counts makes that user/fan not left out.
Make it your best shot.
Our initial idea was push the button first to make the other phones take a shot — the master remote to the slave concept. What makes this a holy shit moment for us is the user interface and user experience — it has a count down timer and when the timer reaches 0 a picture is taken. That simplification makes this a holy shit moment. We can simplify the entire social process that is known today to fewer steps.
Lessons learned
- We modified the original prototype and added features to help our team be more productive through out the day. On the fly development.
- Each feature added helped us grab that perfect shot. Each new feature was added within 2omins or less.
- All the images were saved locally for post processing later. Keep it lean and quick.
- Video was not a feature added — that comes later :)
- We didn’t have time to add a cloud component to the app. That would have slowed down the process.
- There wasn’t a way to preview the sync’d photos until we processed them locally.
- We added sync data in the exif. Slick way for sorting later.
- How can we scale this tech?
The next version. It gets better.
What if we had a central command center that controlled all the devices by collecting, curating and publishing content in real-time? We could build a bullet-time Matrix style rig? Remember what I mentioned above about being in the trailer and noticing the process of publishing content onto the big screen? Yeah, lets make that faster and collect photos from the fans. It would be a participation model — Daina Middleton purposes that same idea.
