The architect of Windows 95 and Windows 98 wants to make your smartphone videos more stylish.
Meet Video Shader, an app for the iPhone that allows users to apply OpenGL filters to their videos as they’re shooting them. The app can turn a quick shot of a user’s bus commute into something out of “A Scanner Darkly,” without a whole lot of effort.
It’s the brainchild of Satoshi Nakajima, the lead architect of Windows 95 and 98, who, since leaving Microsoft, has gone on to work with the Mac and iPhone. He’s also the founder and a board member of UIEvolution, a Kirkland-based design firm that recently landed an $8 million round of venture financing.
The way Nakajima sees it, millions of videos are going un-shared every day, and one of the best ways to change that is to give users the power to apply good-looking filters to what they’re shooting. But unlike other apps that shoot a clean video and then apply filters later, Video Shader records one video that already has the filter applied, and shows it to the user live on screen, as they’re recording it.
The mobile media space is nothing new for Nakajima, who launched Photoshare for the iPhone in 2008. At the time, it was one of the first apps to support sharing photos that users took with the iPhone. But, it ultimately lost the photo sharing war when Instagram started dominating the scene.
“Instagram broke the barrier for users to upload a photo. That was their breakthrough,” Nakajima said in an interview with GeekWire.
But while Nakajima has roots competing against Instagram, he ultimately sees Video Shader as an additive product for the mobile video ecosystem, rather than something that will end up trying to draw users away from social networks’ sharing capabilities.
“They don’t need to move away from Instagram. I actually want to see users posting videos created by Video Shader on Instagram,” he said.
Once a user has shot a video with Video Shader, it’s in their iPhone’s Camera Roll, which means that it’s possible for them to share it with a bunch of popular services, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Right now, Video Shader is undergoing what Nakajima calls a “soft launch”: the app that’s currently available for download in the App Store is fairly light on filters, though it’s possible to create new ones from the four presets that are currently available.
The company plans to launch a filter composer at SXSW that will allow users to create their own filters by chaining together a bunch of effects. I had a chance to test-drive a beta version of the composer, and it’s not necessarily built for everyday users who aren’t familiar with creating filters, but Nakajima says that it’s primarily built for creatives and engineers who want to express themselves with filters.
For people who aren’t necessarily interested in spending time to craft the perfect filter, they can install filters that other users share with them over e-mail or through Facebook. While Nakajima says that there are plans for a central site where people can share filters with one another, right now the only way to get a new one is to have someone else send it to you.
The one disadvantage to Video Shader’s approach is that videos are never stored in an un-altered state. So, while users will be able to see live what their videos will look like altered, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get them back to what they looked like at the time.
Video Shader Lite is available on the iOS App Store. Check out a video of how Video Shader looks below:
