If you were to reinvent Polaroid, what would it look like? A few companies have tried answering that, mostly with instant-print cameras and smartphone-connected printers that riff on Polaroid's best idea: Click, print, enjoy. But that assumes Polaroid was all about the hardware. If you believe the company was focused on framing life's moments in a burst of instant gratification, reinventing it might look a lot like Polaroid Swing.
“There was a rawness to Polaroid pictures. There was an immediacy to them. There was a sense of wonder and magic,” says Polaroid Swing co-founder Tommy Stadlen. "If [Polaroid co-founder] Edwin Land was around today, what would he do to the smartphone photo world?”
Apparently, make an iOS app. It's more ambitious than that, though. Polaroid Swing is a spiritual successor that manages to offer something distinct. It may not be your next social network, but it’s worth a minute of your time.
Or more specifically, a second.
Here’s how it works: Choose one of four Polaroid Swing filters. Capture a one-second moment with the camera. Share with friends in the app or on Twitter and Facebook. It sounds a lot like Apple’s Live Photos, Instagram’s Boomerang, or any number of GIF-making apps. But Swing sets itself apart.
There’s the quality, for one. Most apps that do this create clips that are choppier than a Benny Hill chase sequence. Swing shots are crisp and clear, with a sense of depth. The app captures 60 frames in a second, then stitches more frames between them to smooth things out.
The real star, though, is how you experience a moment. Moving your phone left reverses time, while going right advances it, as quickly or slowly as you like. Floating your cursor over the image creates the same effect on desktop. It's meant to immerse you in someone else's memory. “We want to be a platform that changes the way you look at the world,” says Stadlen.
It’s also a bold ambition---and one that will take more than dusting off the Polaroid name to achieve.
Polaroid Swing has just 10 people behind it, a team that includes former Apple engineers who know how to push a camera to its limits, and Cole Rise, who created many of Instagram’s first filters and its iconic former logo. It's backed by Twitter and Medium co-founder Biz Stone.
Also important to Polaroid Swing's success, though, are the 200 artists to whom the startup seeded the app, both to explore its potential and to create the kind of digital eye candy that draws new users in. "They’ve co-created this new medium with us," Stadlen says. "They’ve done some extraordinary things. We didn’t know that you could take a 3-D selfie with a Polaroid Swing camera, and you can.'
Polaroid Swing is fun to use, fun to play with, and truly immersive. But it shares the same pain point as any new social platform: Aside from those 200 artists, right now it’s a ghost town.
That’s a problem for Polaroid Swing’s platform ambitions. There can be only so many Instagrams and Facebooks and Snapchats. Set your sights a little lower, though, says University of Toronto strategic management professor Joshua Gans, and Swing might be onto something.
“You shouldn’t think of this as a competitor to others but a complement,” says Gans. “It is an interesting idea that some people may embrace. Don’t expect much more than that.”
And like Vine, you can embed Polaroid Swing moments almost anywhere. It's a key strategy for success, says Stadlen. Other paths forward include an undisclosed hardware component, and an Android app once his team figures out how to reconcile "the fascinating engineering challenges" of reconciling myriad camera specs.
Ultimately, none of that may elevate Polaroid Swing beyond its niche. It feels like a place for very specific kind of attainable artistic expression, more than a mass cultural movement. Which isn't necessarily a problem. "The shots that are taken have a certain art to it," says Gans. "Nothing wrong with that. That is what Vine and GIFs were all about too. Do them well and they attract attention."
Polaroid Swing may never be Instagram, any more than its namesake became Canon or Nikon. But that’s the point.
