New App Provides a 360-Degree View

Ben Newhouse, a cofounder of Bubbli, demonstrating the company’s new technology for images at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif.

Bubbli, a stealth Silicon Valley start-up that is inventing a new type of photographic experience it calls “bubbles,” gave an early demonstration of the technology at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif.
The “bubbles” are 360-degree images that take advantage of the location, accelerometer and camera capabilities of mobile phones. They can also be embedded in Web pages.
The effect is somewhat akin to being able to manipulate Google Streetview through tilting and moving the mobile device around, instead of using a mouse.
Standing on stage in front of a live audience of more than 1,000 people on Wednesday, Ben Newhouse and Terrence McArdle, the company’s two founders, held up their iPads to show an image in front of the convention center. Then, the image rotated and panned to show adjacent regions of the scene, depending on how the iPad was held. (There were some early technological hiccups, and Mr. Newhouse asked the audience to turn off their iPhones.) Bubbli, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., currently employs only the two founders. But it announced $2 million of financing from August Capital last month. The two started working on the technology in June and hoped to submit the application to the Apple Store for approval within a month or so.


As an intern, Mr. Newhouse helped create the Monocle feature on Yelp’s iPhone app released in 2009, which layers Yelp’s ratings over businesses that were viewed through the camera. Mr. McArdle has been working in the area of surround imaging for 20 years.


Such bubble images could be used in a variety of circumstances, though Mr. Newhouse said that they would first focus on the consumer market. Individuals could use it to take family photos or to send “postcards” to friends.


In addition, there were industry applications. The demonstration showed a mockup of a newspaper Web site travel section in which the photo on the page was a “magic window” that would pan as the reader moved, as Mr. McArdle explained.


“So much of journalism is about trying to connect you to remote worlds through images, and bubbles uniquely do that,” he said. The technology could also be used for imaginary worlds, like having children jump into a scene in “Alice in Wonderland.”


The Bubbli app is needed to create the bubble images, but it is not needed to view them. The images will be hosted at Bubbli’s own servers, and will be able to be embedded in HTML using iframe technology, Mr. Newhouse said. The first version of the application would be for Apple, but the company was planning to create an Android version quickly, Mr. Newhouse said.


The founders would not discuss the specifics of how they planned to make money from the business. “There are consumers and there is higher quality content,” Mr. Newhouse said. “There is a lot of different ways you can attack that higher quality content.”