Polaroid Swing app brings moving photos to life
Polaroids are back, but with a modern twist. A startup has collaborated with the iconic Polaroid brand to develop an app that updates the appeal of the mid-20th century instant camera for the smartphone age.
The app, called Polaroid Swing, launched on the Apple App Store this month and will make its way to Android phones in the near future. Instead of printing out a photo while you wait -- the magic of the original Polaroid -- it produces a new kind of magic, a moving image of a moment in time.
Users take a photo through the app, choosing between four Polaroid Swing filters, and capture a one-second snapshot which can be shared through the app or on Facebook or Twitter. The movement is revealed when you move your phone: moving it to the right advances the image in real time, while moving it to the left shows the movement in reverse.
If you're viewing on a laptop or a desktop computer, just scroll your cursor over the photos below to see them move.
The app is the brainchild of co-founders Tommy Stadlen and Frederick Blackford, who grew up on the same London street. The two entrepreneurs spent about two years getting to know Polaroid executives and pitching their idea.
"We wanted to stay true to that design heritage that brand heritage, and combine that with innovation from an amazing engineering team in order to push the Polaroid medium forward," Stadlen told CBS News. "It started with a reverence with the Polaroid brand. I mean, Polaroid founder Edwin Land invented instant photography and made available to the world this great tool. Our goal was to say, how do we reinvent Polaroid photography so that people could express themselves in new ways?"
Land's first commercial Polaroid camera, which used self-developing film, was unveiled in New York City in 1948. The Polaroid brand remained popular for decades, until digital cameras and later smartphones and photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Snapchat came into the picture.
Polaroid went through bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2009, but has attempted to keep its brand name alive and relevant by partnering with developers of new technology.
Stadlen said it was an "immense challenge" to find a way to create an app that would be loyal to the original brand but appeal to consumers in the age of Instagram.
"When you took an original Polaroid picture, it would magically appear in front of your eyes, you could touch it then and there, it was very very visceral. So the real challenge was figuring out how to recreate that same feeling of magic," Stadlen explained.
For Polaroid Swing, that sense of magic comes from the surprising flutter of movement in the photos -- similar to Apple's animated Live Photos, available on the latest models of iPhones, and not unlike the moving pictures imagined in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books. Stadlen is betting on the tactility of touching your phone and watching an image come to life as recreating the thrill of watching a Polaroid picture come to life.
"I was watching someone use the app in a cafe in San Francisco the other day, and -- just by watching someone swiping and touching on there phone -- I could see that the user was tapping into something visceral by combining touch with picture-taking," he said.
Of course, Polaroid Swing is swinging into a world already saturated with photo apps. Can it compete? So far, Stadlen says the response has been positive. It's been featured on the App Store's home page and adopted by users more quickly than anticipated, he said.
Before the app was released to the public, the Polaroid Swing team tested it out for a year with 200 artists to see what they could create with the technology. Stadlen said he is interested to see how a new generation of photographers could make use of the technology in the way that Andy Warhol, for instance, so readily embraced the original Polaroid cameras, capturing simple snaps of New York's creative nightlife.
In the grand scheme of things, Stadlen suggested that his app fits into a trend where the digital and physical worlds are increasingly blurred. From 3D printing to augmented reality games like "Pokemon Go," the distinction between what's "real" and what's digital is becoming less stark.
"I think this is a really interesting place for photography to evolve," he added. "We are hoping to make smartphone photography much more tangible and tactile and visceral than it has been int he past. Sometimes we don't even look at the images we are consuming, we just flick through them and move on. We're hoping that we can get people to linger again. To really engage with the image."
