Robert Macauley never intended to bring a famous aspect of the Harry Potter series to life, but there appears to be no better way of describing his news creation, LifePrint.
Launching today on Kickstarter, LifePrint is a pocket-sized printer and mobile phone app that allows users to print physical pictures on the go and watch as they come to life.
Whether it is a Vine, GIF or Live Photo, users can print the photo themselves or share the photo for their friends to print. The handheld printer uses the inkless technology of Zink to create a small image.
Upon holding a camera over the print, photo recognition kicks in, triggering the cloud to find and deliver the matching “moving image.” The camera then tracks the corners of the physical image and places the digital moving image within the space.
“1.8 billion photos are shared a day and there is some small subset that you want to keep in your life as an extra memory,” said Macauley. “The reason why people aren't printing is not that people want photographs less than 20 years ago, it’s that photographs have not caught up to modern paradigms and expectations of what people expect photos to do — they expect them to be dynamic and shareable.”
While the technology for moving images has been around for a few years, Macauley says LifePrint is the first company to utilize it in a personal way and the first company to create what he calls a “one-to-many printing network.”
The printer is available to early birds for $99 and each piece of Zinc paper costs 40 cents. The company plans to roll out a major Christmas marketing plan, capitalizing on the one way people still send photographs — greeting cards.
What’s next for LifePrint? Macauley hopes to incorporate advertising into the product, allowing companies like Gap to send you a live ad with one of their models that can also be used as a coupon if physically brought into the store.
As for making a collage of moving images, sorority girls will have to wait. The ability to capture multiple LifePrints in one screen is next on the company’s long list of innovations.
Photos and videos courtesy of LifePrint
