In a market saturated with photo sharing apps, San Francisco startup Fyusion is bringing a fresh new angle (360 degrees, to be exact) to visual sharing with its spatial app, Fyuse. Part picture, part video, fyuses go beyond traditional media forms to allow users to share a 3D look at a moment and the space around it. Users create fyuses by moving their mobile devices around an object, person or scene, and view the scene from different angles up to 360 degrees simply by tilting their phones.
Another unique feature Fyuse brings to the table is the integration of 3D text in your images. The text is inserted into the 3D sphere of the image, so it appears to be a physical object in the same plane as the subject.
Impressively, Fyuse works as smoothly as it appears to in these previews. The image preview feed supports both vertical and horizontal rotation, with clickthrough to a wider view. The only real issue with the app is that feed and images are very slow to load, likely due to large files and insufficient backend resources. Unfortunately for Fyuse, this speed issue could be a crushing blow to its success – no matter how innovative or well-designed your app is, if it feels slow and glitchy, no one will use it.
Given the significant work needed, the best hope for Fyuse is to be bought out by and integrated with Instagram. Snapchat could also integrate Fyuse’s pseudo-3D format as part of its experience, but the fleeting impermanence of Snapchat’s 10-second-maximum messages does not lend itself to complex interactions during viewing, whereas Instagram’s replayable images and videos could easily blend well with Fyuse’s rotate-to-view interaction. Not only would this be a big success for Fyuse, it would bring a fresh angle to Instagram, and help the social media giant stay at the forefront of what users want.
