Gadgetory

This is the Lifeprint. It's a printer who's pictures can turn into videos. Lifeprint uses an app that ties into social networks like Vine and Instagram. Or to your phones camera. You can use it to print normal photos if you want but you can also do something more. First pick a photo. Then pick a video. Then hit print. The printer heats up crystals of dye baked into the film. It's the same technology that new Polaroid cameras use. You get a picture in about thirty seconds. Once the photo is printed try scanning it with Lifeprint's app. The app picks out the picture using image recognition then calls whatever video it was paired with. You can either print photos out yourself or you can send them to other people who have printers. So it's a little like the real life version of living photos in Harry Potter, except that you have to look at them through a phone. It's also a kind of steganography, a message hidden inside a message. Steganography is used by dissidents and spies and kids playing with invisible ink. That's not really what Lifeprint is about. But you can still use it to hide secrets. Like say... Rick Astley. This can be more complicated than it sounds at first. Like what if you print out the same photo twice but you assign a different video to each one? Well it's supposed to be able to tell them apart using watermarks that are hidden somewhere in the photo. Unfortunately it doesn't work in the prototype we tried. And neither did some other features. That will hopefully be fixed in the final version which is coming out in September for $130. $130 is a lot of money, but it isn't too bad for a miniature photo printer. Or for that matter an instant camera.