Download DejaView on the App Store
DejaView is our second experimental camera app. It has its roots in an analog film camera we own called the LOMO Supersampler. We probably bought this camera around the year 02000 and we’ve taken it all over the world with us.
What makes this camera so special is that there are four lenses that fire each with a slight delay from the previous. The result is on a single 4:3 frame you get four small time slices creating a short animation. The camera allows you to set a 0.2s or 2.0s timeframe.
A similar camera is the Kalimar Action Shot 16. This has 16 lenses and had a unique purpose to help you analyze your golf swing. This was an early “Burst Mode” style camera that was a blunt approach to capturing the action by just taking lots of pictures. The camera took 16 images on two frames of film.
The other project we drew inspiration from was a virtual “magic mirror”. It was a simple experiment that used a webcam and a large screen to show customers at clothing stores what they were wearing. The “magic” part was that there was a few seconds delay on the webcam. This allowed patrons to spin around and get a good view of themselves from different angles, spin back around and see it in the “mirror’s” delay.
There is a short story called “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, which puts forward the idea of “slow glass”. Glass with such a high refraction level that it takes years for light to pass through creating a massive delayed effect.
Playing with the idea of time delays using the phone’s camera is possible in the digital era. We love all these ideas and bundled them into our newest experimental camera app DejaView.
Building on our knowledge from the Ornithoto Camera app, we created an iOS app that uses the camera’s video feed to save individual frames as images. Since we know we want this camera to take four frames on a delay, we kept a buffer of a few seconds of previous frames.
The analog cameras would wait for a shutter press, then open the apertures in sequence taking a photo. We wanted to explore that “magic mirror” experience and save photos from the past. In DejaView, when you press the shutter button it doesn’t start the photo taking experience, it completes it. Using the video buffer we reach into the past to get the previous frames to make the collage.
The app itself has all the regular features: change camera lenses, adjust the delay, a timer, the ability to save the collage and source images, change from a few different collage types, and make an animated gif of the results.
The results are “clean” digital photos which lack film grain, LOMO’s vignetting and soft edges of a plastic lens. Rather than add these in the camera with more options and settings, we’ll leave the post-processing to you so you can salt-to-taste. (Which is partly why we allow you to save the four original images too).
You can download the DejaView app for your iPhone today. It is currently free, but as we get feedback and fix bugs, we’ll eventually set a small price to download. If you get it now, all future updates will be free.
The app is niche and certainly won’t be your go-to daily camera, but it is a lot of fun to take pictures from the past. The results make you smile and your friends say Wow!
Download DejaView on the App Store