Snapily Ever After?

There’s a new startup out there called Snapily, which is an online store that creates user-customized ads, photos, cards and other paper goods into a pseudo 3-D effect. It looks pretty cool, I must say. They even add movement to 2-D images, namely photos. 

Snapily fills a void that Shutterfly, CafePress and Ofoto can’t fill – the moving, 3-D market. It seems really cool, and there’s a great video at TechCrunch’s blog that shows how it all works. You can make a photo 3-D, you can make two photos morph into one (the example is a baby face that morphs into a woman’s face), or you do a “flip” photo, where when you tilt the photo up, it shows one image, and when you flip it back down, it shows another image.

All very cool stuff that uses lenticular printing, which shows a different image depending on which angle you are looking at the photo from.  Snapily is a spinoff from HumanEyes, which has been lenticular printing for about seven years. According to the HumanEyes Web site, lenticular lenses are used to create the 3-D and morphing images. “Lenticular lenses are plastic lenses consisting of an array of optical elements (lenticules). When viewed from different angles, different areas under the lens are magnified. Lenticular images are those which are specially prepared images to which the lens is attached. Views are arranged under lenticules so that each eye is projected a different view. The brain then processes these views to a single coherent 3D image.”

Snapily offers business cards, greeting cards, notebooks and scrapbooks that can hold these “moving” images. A newer technology is in the works in which you can create a 2-second movie clip on a card that plays when you rotate it. Snapily has some competition, but it says that you have to order in bulk from its competition, but you can order in small quantities from Snapily. The products start at $3.99.

Snapily is an Israeli start-up and it uses technology called Depth Illusion Digital Imaging (DIDI), which enables the illusion of a 3-D image to be displayed on any kind of computer monitor, cell phone or overhead projector. Basically, the technology makes an image on a flat surface look 3-D.

It sounds really cool, and it looks really cool, but I offer this info with caution. Unfortunately, a TechCrunch reader posted a comment that said he ordered and paid for his product, but he hasn’t received the product. To me this is a very dark cloud over the company. The customer says he has contacted Snapily twice, but no one has gotten back to him. I really hope that this isn’t a flaky company because I really like its products, but I can’t do business with a company with bad customer service.