Eyegroove

» see eyegroove.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The first time I understood what eyegroove had been, I was watching tiktok years after it was gone. Eyegroove got to the lip-sync music-video idea in 2013, before musical.ly made it a middle-school religion and long before tiktok made it everyone's. I was around thirty, a computer engineer in ankara, and the demographic for filming yourself mouthing along to a song was not one I belonged to. I can see now that the app was early. At the time it was invisible to me.

It was made in san francisco by scott snibbe, an interactive-media artist who had done museum installations and worked with björk, and his cofounder graham mcdermott. The app let you record a video up to thirty seconds long, in one take or several, performing or lip-syncing to a track, with augmented-reality effects layered on top. The effects were the part people admired. It was, for its moment, a genuinely nice piece of software.

It also never got big. It launched into an app store already crowded with video toys, and it never found the scale that musical.ly stumbled into a year or two later with almost the same idea aimed squarely at teenagers. What eyegroove had was good technology and good taste, which turned out to be exactly the thing facebook wanted to buy.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

The pitch was that anyone could make a music video, not just perform to a song but wrap it in effects that reacted to the beat. Snibbe came from the art side, so the effects were more considered than the usual sticker-and-filter fare. You can draw a straight line from what eyegroove was doing in 2014 to the camera-effects layer that now sits inside instagram and every app like it. The difference is that eyegroove was a small company doing it first, and the small company is the one that does not survive being first.

~ what it became ~

In august 2016 facebook acquired the eyegroove team. It was an acqui-hire, not a product purchase: facebook wanted the people, specifically their work on real-time camera effects, and folded them into what became the camera-effects platform that shipped across instagram and the other facebook apps. The app itself was shut down. The users, who had spent two years making grooves, got a goodbye note and an export window.

The technology did not die, it just moved. Everything eyegroove pioneered is now ambient in the phone camera, unremarkable, built into products used by billions. The app that introduced it is a wikipedia stub. That is the standard exchange rate for being early: your idea becomes infrastructure and your name becomes a footnote.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »