We are really excited to launch our first project on Kickstarter. It is the first solution to create, share and watch virtual reality with your iPhone. Everybody knows that the iPhone 6 (and the new iPhone 6S) has an incredible camera and processing power. With Shot we are trying to add the last ingredient to make possible capturing immersive videos and photos, the ability to “see more”.
In summary, Shot is a lens attachment composed of two lenses that increase the field of view of your phone’s camera, and an app that allows you to easily record and share immersive content.
It is as easy as opening the app, slide the lens attachment and start recording and sharing immersive videos and photos in one shot. The interface is similar to other apps like Instagram or Vine. Combined with a virtual reality headset, the Shot app allows you to look around and experience your photos and videos in a totally different way.
Create. Watch. Discover. All in a single app. Follow your friends and share your creations with them. Scroll through your friend’s photos and videos or discover popular content around the world. To watch the content the app includes several visualization modes:
A Cardboard compatible headset is included with every lens kit so you can experience the VR Full screen mode whenever you want.
Once we realised that we could use the phone cameras to create a virtual reality camera, we felt that we had to do it. Our goal was to build something affordable and really easy to use. You take a picture or record a video and the app does all the heavy lifting under the hood to create immersive experiences that you can watch in a virtual reality headset like the Google Cardboard.
Not every fisheye lens is suitable to capture immersive virtual reality content. We spent months trying different configurations until we found the right one. We know you will not be carrying your phone with the lens attachment on it all the time, so it had to be very easy to slide in and out. It is also really important that the lenses are perfectly aligned with the phone’s cameras. To meet both requirements we’ve iterated through several prototypes
In order to capture a 360 degrees photo the app takes one photo with each camera and merges them into a high resolution panorama in a transparent way to you.
The iPhone can’t record video using the two cameras at the same time so it is impossible to create a 360º video the same way we do it with photos. The immersive video created with Shot covers 235 degrees using just one of the cameras. The total available field of view for videos is the equivalent to looking around while you are sitting on a chair.
The field of view of an ordinary mobile camera is not wide enough to capture immersive content. That’s why we have created a lens attachment for iPhone 6/6S and 6/6S Plus. Shot’s lens attachment modifies how the light enters the camera sensors and increases the horizontal field of view of each camera up to 235 degrees from the original 75 degrees.
We have worked together as software engineers for several years for a well known social network startup in Spain. Our passion for virtual reality and building cool products led us to start this project on Kickstarter.
We started this company with the vision of making virtual reality content creation accessible to everyone, not just professional filmmakers.
Earlier this year when we started noticing how all the pieces lined up to make Shot possible we wondered why no one was doing it already. In a way, our vision goes in the opposite direction of the industry efforts, we want to create something affordable and easy to use instead of an expensive device composed of several cameras.
We will use the funds raised to pay for tooling and actual production costs.
The Shot lens attachment and app for iPhone are just the first steps in building our company. We are already planning the Android version of the app and a compatible lens attachment. We have big plans for the next generation virtual reality headsets but we need your help to keep innovating and to achieve our vision.
Since February 2015, we moved from an idea to a functional prototype that works really well with iPhone. We cleared the most difficult part but now we need your help to take it into production.