New app on the ios app store - Retake

[dwilhelmi]

Not sure if anyone here would be interested, but I wanted to post it anyway just because I'm a new app developer and I need all the advertising I can get.

Retake is a camera app that allows you to recreate any existing picture on your phone perfectly. You can choose any picture, and Retake will fire up the camera, but with your chosen image overlaid on top of the viewfinder. You can then line up your old picture with the current view in the viewfinder. When everything lines up, you take the picture, and you are good to go!

Perfect for things like before and after pictures, recreating antique pictures, tracking progress of a remodel project, or following your facial hair growth through Novembeard.

You can get it from the App Store here.

You can also Like it on Facebook here.

[nietzsche]

we are the ADD generation, we need a video to understand what does that app do.

[yang guize]

don't buy from apple inc. they kill children.

[Neoteny]

I prefer children that are killed by Google.

[yang guize]

you like dead children?

[Neoteny]

Only when provided by my favorite global corporation.

[yang guize]

i hear that these corporations, they have competitions. they say to their workers 'go and slaughter children'. and the worker who kills the most children and films it gets a promotion.

not very nice (-_-')

[dwilhelmi]

we are the ADD generation, we need a video to understand what does that app do.

No video, yet, but how about some examples?

One example would be if you want to take a picture of your kid every year on the first day of school. The closer each picture matches the previous picture, the cooler the overall effect. So, by using my app, you can literally get everything in the picture exactly the same, except for your kid - which shows in much greater detail how much they have changed in that time.

Another use I have heard people talking about is if you have an ooold picture, like a picture of a building from the 30s. If you scan that picture and put it on my phone, you can then go to that building today, and use my app to find the exact position where that picture was taken from. You can then take a new picture, showing the current state of the building, and have it be from the exact same location, angle and zoom as the picture from the 30s.

My biggest success story thus far comes from a picture my wife took three years ago. There is a building on KU's campus called The Oread. Three years ago, it was still under construction, and my wife took this picture with her canon point and shoot:

Just last week, I went to KU's campus, went to approximately the same area, and I fired up Retake. Using the app, I was able to find the exact location to take a new picture from, so it would match the old picture. As a result, I was able to take this:

Because the pictures are almost identical in position, it really highlights the features that have changed in the last three years. You can see the tree in the front left has grown significantly, and the yellow poles in the far center have been added, and the tree on the right has been trimmed up from where it was.

These kinds of things are what you can use Retake for.

[Haggis_McMutton]

That's a pretty cool app.

Do you mind if I ask how it works?
I'm guessing computer vision, but I'm not sure exactly how you'd approach this problem.

[dwilhelmi]

That's a pretty cool app.

Do you mind if I ask how it works?
I'm guessing computer vision, but I'm not sure exactly how you'd approach this problem.

No, nothing so complex as that. It just lays the old image semi-transparently on top of the camera. Since you can see the old image on top of what you are taking currently, you can line up the parts of the image that are the same - such as the walkways and the street in The Oread picture above. Once those parts of the pictures are lined up, you take the new picture.

In the end, it is still just a camera taking a normal picture. It just helps you be able to figure out how to position the camera in order to get it exactly the same.

[Haggis_McMutton]

That's a pretty cool app.

Do you mind if I ask how it works?
I'm guessing computer vision, but I'm not sure exactly how you'd approach this problem.

No, nothing so complex as that. It just lays the old image semi-transparently on top of the camera. Since you can see the old image on top of what you are taking currently, you can line up the parts of the image that are the same - such as the walkways and the street in The Oread picture above. Once those parts of the pictures are lined up, you take the new picture.

In the end, it is still just a camera taking a normal picture. It just helps you be able to figure out how to position the camera in order to get it exactly the same.

Ah I see. I thought it lined it up for you automatically.

Yeah, this makes more sense, cause I don't think the computer vision approach would have worked on anything other than cases with very similar pictures.

Anyway, cool app, good luck with it.