The Challenge

Blending a historical photo with a new photo has been accomplished by various artists/photographers using technical photo editing tools, cameras, and a lot of time consuming upfront work. The challenge was to streamline this process and allow users with no technical knowledge to do the same in realtime with a mobile device.

The Solution

The Timewarp App provides people with historic photos from nearby locations and guides them to take a photo of themselves from the same perspective as the historical photo using Timewarp’s camera and alignment tools. Using Timewarp's editing tool people can easily layer and fade between photos, and share their creations through their favorite social media.

Contextual Inquiries

Creating Context

We hypothesized the concept would be sticky with young adults based on selfie and travel trends. I tested two use cases with young adults to create context and summarized my major insights.

Mirror Effect

• Due to the iphone’s selfie mirror effect objects on the left appear on the right. This was disorienting when corresponding a historical photo.

Geo-tagged & Guide

• Spacial awareness skills are put to the test to find the exact location the historical photo. Directions to the exact geo-tagged historical photo need to be specific.

Correlating Photos

• It was difficult get a shot with the correct angle. Spent ~3mins swiping back and forth between the historical photo and the camera. Need to view both the historical photo and the photo preview on the same screen.

Strong Anchor

• A strong anchor is needed to correlate the new shot to the historical photo. For example: lining up the pillars in this historical Fairmont postcard.

People Carry Weight

• Photos with people in the historical photos carry more weight than those of just the landmark. They bring more context to the era the photo was taken and were more interesting.

User WIREFLOW

Let Me Take a Selfie

Based on the pain points and needs identified from the contextual inquiries, I designed a low fidelity user flow of a user discovering nearby historical photos, selecting a historical photo, and taking a selfie from the same perspective as the historical photo. The flow helped the team visualize a streamlined user journey.

Feature Matrix

Complexity vs. Value

We felt the feature with the highest user value was juxtaposing a person's photo with a corresponding old photo; although, getting the new photo to actually match the old photo in realtime to the point it looked "cool," was technically challenging. Also, we were not completely confident of product/market fit to invest in technical competencies. Based on complexity we decided to pivot from our original concept.

Major Pivot

Selfie into History

We discovered that taking a photo with an iPhone 7 Plus or the (soon to be released) iPhone X in Portrait mode, we could separate a photo's foreground from the background using the TrueDepth technology. With this revelation, we could easily cut people out of a photo using depth data. We thought:

What if Timewarp was actually the app that one uses to "Selfie themselves into history?"

One could take a selfie (anywhere) and could put themselves in some amazing/funny historical events, then share on social media.

Next STePS

Beginning of "Warp"

Our concept of the app completely shifted. Our original idea was too complex, and feedback validated that users wanted to create quick cutouts.

We decided to focus our MVP on creating "easy cutouts" that could be juxtaposed with photo of a user's choosing, since it was a relatively low complexity and had high user value. Using a slider tool users could "magically" separate the foreground from the background. 

Next steps were to (1) identify and analyze the competition and (2) formalize a user friendly UI.