When Prisma Meets New York City: The App That Will Make You a Modern Day Picasso

When I was younger I tried my hand at many things, art being one of them. If I had known then what I know now I probably could have saved myself that two and a half hours I spent on a wet Saturday afternoon trying to become the next Van Gogh. You’re probably wondering what do I know now that I didn’t back then? Well last week I came across maybe one of the coolest apps I’ve seen in recent memory and one that I believe will soon become a part of everybodys social media arsenal, it’s called Prisma.

In case you haven’t heard of the app, let me give you the lowdown. Prisma is a Photo filtering app that uses Artificial Intelligence that lets you turn your ordinary mundane photos into elaborate works of art with the click of a button.

Radio City Music Hall, New York City.

I have to give credit to Ross Simmonds who gave me the tip about the app on his Snapchat channel. (Which you should all follow by the way @thecoolestcool) Simmonds, a serial entrepreneur and marketer himself says that “Prisma is the next Instagram if there’s ever going to be one” and that may turn out to be very true as rumours are ripe that Facebook are already eyeing up an acquistion.

The app itself is the product of Russian Entrepreneurs Alexy Moiseenkov and Andrey Usoltsev and is currently sitting at the top of the Apple app store in over 40 countries as well as having generated 1.5 million daily active users thus far.

The beauty of the app lies in its simplicity, you simply take a photo or choose a photo from your gallery, apply one of 33 filters available and Voila, you instantly have your masterpiece.

Grand Central Station, New York City

You’ve probably noticed by now that I couldn’t resist delving into my camera roll and turning some of New York City’s most famous landmarks into works of Prisma art.

The notion of adding filters has been around for quite some time now, however relying on Artificial Intelligence to completely remake the image is an entirely fresh concept. The typical filter you use on Instagram or Snapchat merely acts as an overlay on the original photo, whereas Prisma’s filter technology recreates the photo from scratch, It’s Impressive stuff.

Like anything that’s worth talking about, the app has also been subject to scrutiny, many claiming that it has the potential to devalue the work of real artists that put weeks and sometimes months into carefully hand crafted works of art and not with the touch of a button on your smartphone. Somehow I don’t think the two markets will clash.

So what’s next for Prisma?

The Moscow based company aren’t resting on their laurels and are currently working on bringing the same advanced filter technology to video. Similar to photos, we’ve all seen basic filters been applied to video, however recreating a video through AI and being able to see an almost lifelike work of art in motion is something that ranks high on the scale of innovation.

Given its continous growth of daily users it won’t be long before we see a lot of Prisma created masterpieces flood our Facebook and Instagram timelines. Today also marks the day that the app is now available for download on Android, don’t wait, get creating.

-Michael.