About this project
$42,748
556
Funding Goal Reached, Congratulations!
Thanks again for all of your incredible support, especially over the last 72 hours of our campaign. We reached our funding goal of $40k on Friday, May 18 at 8:05AM EDT (nearly three full hours to spare!).
What the Press are Saying
Endgadget - This technology is a perfect fit for online retailers, educators, and, ahem, even gadget reviewers
Eric Schonfeld, former Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch - This is truly disruptive...
CNET - Arqball lets you quickly create a spinning model of an object for sale and embed it in a sales page
Forbes - Anyone can create "spins," interactive data sets, with their phone...It's for people selling stuff to create much more compelling representations of their products.
TUAW - could mean some big things for 3D modeling in the future...Very cool indeed.
Venture Beat - If you've ever wanted an easy way to create a 360-degree interactive video to show off a new product, Arqball Spin has you covered
What’s A Spin?
Spins are interactive visualizations of a 3D object that you can zoom in and out and spin around an axis—an experience like touching the real physical object on your mobile, tablet, or laptop.
Interact with a Spin of an Ant
Interact with a Spin of our Red Shoes
Producing similar visualizations previously required professional photographers, dedicated facilities, and thousands of dollars in equipment. Our goal is to change that, and we need your help!
We’re Halfway There
Arqball was founded by Jason Lawrence and Abhi Shelat, two Computer Science professors at the University of Virginia with PhDs from Princeton and MIT.
We reached our first milestone with the release of Arqball Spin, our free iPhone app. It captures spins of an object on a rotating stage, which simulates rotating the phones's camera in a perfect circle around the object. The optimal speed is three revolutions per minute (RPM), which captures all of the rich details of any object in just 20 seconds. Here is a short (and silent) video illustrating the complete process of using Arqball Spin to create, edit, and share a spin (please note that the stage shown in this video is one of our early prototypes, the ones you will be receiving by backing this campaign will have either a red/white/black body and a white top like the hi-res image further down below):
We launched Arqball Spin at South By Southwest in March, and have spent two years developing the software as well as building and testing prototypes of stages in our labs. Now we’re asking for funding to design and manufacture our first run of custom stages.
Why A Custom Stage?
Our deep understanding of computer vision and has led us to the conclusion that achieving a simple and reliable user experience and high-quality visualization requires some form of motion control. There is just no way around this. Our stage will provide that motion control in the simplest way possible.
The stage doesn't need to communicate with the capture device (e.g., phone or tablet) in any way and has a single on/off switch. This makes the final system flexible and very easy to use.
Please see the FAQ to learn how the rest of our service works.
Where Funding Goes
We have all of the engineering specifications and now we need to raise $40k in order to design and manufacture our first run of stages. These stages will be functional and super cool:
· The hull is CNC lathed from 6063 aluminum and powder-coated in the color of your choice—red, white, or black.
· Our stages are rugged and portable (powered by batteries) and possess a beautifully simple design inspired by Arne Jacobson's "salad bowl."
If successfully funded, we will be ready to get started right away and anticipate that the first stages would ship within 1-2 months. By backing our project you will become one of the first to access this exciting new technology.
We plan on making the final designs available for free (open-source) on our website to support hacking and design improvements.
Help us take the next step by successfully funding this project! This is just the beginning!
Questions about this project? Check out the FAQ
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Funding period
- (30 days)