When we were planning our New Years Party last year, I thought it would be cool if people at the party could share the pictures they were taking in real-time. I imagined it would work like this:
- Take picture with camera phone.
- Email, MMS, picture text it to some address.
- Use projector to show slideshow of pictures received.
I hacked this together one afternoon. The result:
Not bad. It actually worked pretty well at the party. For this hack implementation I used:
- Tumblr as datastore. Tumblr accepts pictures sent to an email address, so I just made a slide with instructions and the input email address display every 10 slides. You can see the slideshow as a blog here: http://nyepic.tumblr.com/
- The awesome jQuery cycle plugin
The whole thing is just one static HTML page, and you can view source of the page to see my entire hack javascript.
The business idea here is to create a real service out of it. This prototype was very well received and people seemed to love interacting and being on the big screen. I’ve thought of at least ten ways you could charge for this service. Charge per event (4 hour period), charge for a certain amount of photos, charge to import directly to Facebook, etc. I suppose this could work with Eye-Fi too…
Thoughts on technical implementation: I think Lamson would fit well here for receiving the emails/mms/picture texts. I downloaded it and poked around the code. Pretty exciting project.
