[Android Apps and Games] wpmed92:
Hey everyone!

I'd like to introduce you to my new app called Expose. It was released on 24th of December (on Christmas Eve, also, on my birthday)

So here's the compressed story of this app:

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Background

I'm Ahmed Harmouche, co-founder and CTO of VIMAGE, a popular photo animation app.

For about 4 years we have been developing VIMAGE with the goal to create the most realistic photo animation app.

Hello GPU

This summer I started playing around with other techniques, forgetting a bit about our "most realistic" mission, and moving towards artistry, colors, lights, glitch, and other things I found interesting. From a technical point of view I transitioned from the CPU based Canvas (VIMAGE rendering is 99% CPU and Canvas based) world, to the GPU based OpenGL + fragment shader world.

I found it quite fascinating what amazing effects you can achieve in fragment shaders. I browsed a lot through Shadertoy and learned from the cool shaders created by this amazing community.

Move the glitch!

As I looked around I saw glitch effects are quite popular, on photos and in videos as well. The apps out there for photo produce static glitch photo output, video glitch editors, of course, produce video, but I didn't see apps producing glitch videos from photos. There are some, but they don't focus on moving filters. Photoshop Camera for example, they have some presets that move, but only a handful. So I wanted an app the focuses on moving glitch filters.

The app

Only glitch though? As I researched a bit more I found other interesting effects that could fit in the app: dual lightning, split color, color switch, drip art. These are all effects that you can find (more or less) in other apps like PicsArt, but they are all static. So I put them also in the app, as moving filters.

The other twist in the app, besides that filters are live, is that filters can affect only the background, only the foreground, or the whole photo, automatically, by a technique called Saliency Object Detection, achieved using a neural network. So when I code a preset, I can specify what effect I want on each layer.

An important aspect of the app is that it is preset based. The reason of this is that as VIMAGE grew big and quite advanced from the initial "pick an effect and generate" workflow, I wanted to go back to simplicity. Just select a preset, and everything is set for you. But as Albert Einstein said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler", I also provided some seekbars so that the user can tweak the parameters of the presets. One missing piece for not breaking this "no simpler" rule is manual masking. If AI foreground selection fails, filters can look bad, so manual masking is needed in this case.

So summarized, the app is a preset-based photo editing app, that focuses on moving, looping (glitch) filters, and can automatically apply filters on background and foreground.

The release

After some internal testing, and a short pre-registration period, we went live on 24th of December. It's very early to draw any conclusions, as numbers are pretty small yet, but as I see the analytics a large percentage of users save and share their work, so it seems they like what they're creating. As what's next: I'm fixing crashes, and analyzing the data, to see with which preset categories the users engage the most, and then I will focus more on those categories.

This release was very exciting for me, as the whole tech stack of the app is completely different from VIMAGE: It is written in Kotlin, using Android Architecture Components, and the rendering is OpenGL based.

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Future plans

At the initial idea stage I knew I wanted this app to be a platform where others can create presets and share them. The reason is that now I'm the one who codes the presets, but I'm sure there are a lot of more creative editors/creators out there who can build a lot more amazing effects than me, so why not let them do so? It's like when you build a game engine, you won't necessarily build the best games. Or if you know how to make a guitar, will you be the best guitar player? The other reason is that I think an in-app community, a platform can drive user engagement and retention.

So, that's all folks! I hope you will like the app, and any feedback, suggestion is greatly appreciated!

email: hello@vimageapp.com (company), ahmedharmouche92@gmail.com (personal)

Ps.: Feel free to email us if you want early access to the creator suite