Ever since Apple launched live photos back in 2015, it has been a great hit. It is one of those rare features where Apple had a first mover advantage and Android is yet to provide a native version of it. For those who don’t know what Live Photo is all about: when this feature is turned on, iPhone captures 1.5s of video right before photo is clicked. This allows you to capture, not only the stills, but moments around it too. Now, we all know iPhone isn’t a device that targets masses. Also, I still like to keep some stuff, completely offline away from digital lives we live. Therefore, this anniversary, I decided to gift something unique to my spouse.
I wanted to do something around my photos and videos. But, who are we kidding! We (specially me) don’t open our galleries to revisit the memories stored in digital format. Next challenge was that print media won’t offer the video. Duh!. That is when I found a solution that marries the both worlds perfectly. Enter Homingos. Let’s explore what it had in store.
What is Homingos:
I found this website on one of the social media platforms. They would give you a normal looking printed version of your photo and when you scan it from their mobile app, voila! A video picked by you appears in the frame. They use augmented reality to accomplish this. You can think of it as a physical version of your Apple Live Photos! Cool right?
So, I can now pick a sweet moment captured as a ‘still’ and put in a video captured around that. For eg. I chose a photo of my engagement day and overlaid the video of celebrating our first anniversary on that photo.
The Experience:
Of course by the look of it, it is just a pretty photo pasted over a fancy cardboard. But ‘revelation time’ is pretty exciting. I could see the happiness on the face of my wife when she saw that video playing on that frame. The entire exercise is also very user friendly. Although it just involves a couple of steps of downloading the application and then scanning the photo, they throw in a small tutorial and troubleshooting guide.
Ordering Process:
This is one aspect where I believe a lot of thought has been put into. You can either login into the website and upload photo + video there OR you can simply trigger the WhatsApp bot and share your photo and video against fixed responses. It did not take me more than 5 minutes to place the order. I am usually concerned about this step because once I went to Gujrat and to get the liquor license I had to upload my ID in specific dimension and size (it gets super annoying)
Price:
Price point is something I am a little concerned about. At ₹ 400 a card, the price point looked a little steep to me. However, in a business of art and emotions, pricing is a very subjective topic. So I would leave it up to you to derive the actual value of this product.
Conclusion:
I think it is a perfect gift for a small occasion where you want to memorize that day but still don’t want to spend too much on the gift. Other than that you may use a video card to prepare a small photo/video library (of sorts) of your own memories. It is always to go through the old photo albums (physical). Imagine if all of them also had videos tagged along.
Here’s the Homingo’s video card in action. (Source)
