Most of us pre-millennials pine for the days when you can wind real film in camera, watch it develop, and put it in a photo album or project it on a wall. But many post-millienials pine too for the same tangibility – that demographic that considers the early 90s retro and that gives a blank stare when you ask them if they remember VHS and the note video stores put on the clunky black boxes that read, “Be Kind Rewind.” There is a new trend in gimmickry and gadgetry and all sorts of products are popping up that make your digital something tangible. This is the case with Projecteo – a tiny Instagram projector that can bring your Instagram pictures to real life and splash them on a wall.
Projecteo, which is currently raking in the crowd funding cash on Kickstarter, will most likely become just another forgettable product that seems nostalgic and exciting now, but will be one day be something you accidently discover in your junk drawer and wonder where it came from.
Projecteo is essentially a miniature projector that holds a wheel with a single slide of 35mm film cut into a circle that holds 9 photos. Using a special app you can choose the photos you want from your Instagram feed and Projecteo, using a process similar to what Hollywood uses to convert digital to film for theater projection, puts those images on the slide wheel – and you can collect as many wheels as you want. And because it is slide film you will get no pixilation when projecting the film, but the image is not more than two and half feet wide. I’m entirely impressed.
Currently, Projecteo has some funding goals to meet to get their projectors up and running, and shipped – and they are doing just fine going way past their goal with 32 days to go. If you donate $500 – which no one has done as of yet – you get a gold plated Projecteo. In my opinion I’m just fine with showing my photos exclusively on my phone. Projecting them on a wall in a dark room seems a little socially desperate.
