Somewhat surprising. As a technology company with innovation as its main label, Shadowstone has released a new generation of panoramic camera, the Insta360 X4, which has hardly changed significantly compared to its predecessor.
This "matryoshka" approach is a bit like an apple. Liu Jingkang, the founder of Shadowstone, joked on his social media account that after questioning Apple, Shadowstone finally understood Apple and became Apple. Of course, he modestly added that "not as good as apples".
According to the data of 2023, Shadow Stone has the largest market share of panoramic cameras in the world, and it has more than 50%. By the end of 2023, the previous generation X3 had shipped more than one million units.
In fact, Apple's influence on Shadow Stone goes far beyond product design. In 2016, Shadowstone's first panoramic camera, the Nano, was an external accessory that could be physically attached to the iPhone. Its ingenuity lies in the fact that it "borrows" the computing power of the iPhone and compresses the time for the film.
This is the core pain point of the panoramic camera product category. In essence, the panoramic camera solves the technical pain point of "recording" in the process of taking pictures - because it is equipped with multiple cameras, it can actually shoot first and frame later; However, the long waiting time for the film is prohibitive for users at first. No one wants to go snow skiing for two hours with a panoramic camera and then spend two weeks working on video and image footage in complex formats.
But these are never the problems of the image itself. In recent years, the explosion of AI and breakthroughs in chip technology have rapidly improved the computing power of smart hardware devices, and this has also allowed panoramic cameras to see the possibility of approaching the mass consumer market from outdoor hardcore players.
01 Subverting the "fundamentalism" of photography
Although the camera has been around for nearly 200 years, the matter of "taking pictures" has changed dramatically.
More than 100 years ago, taking pictures was a craft that earned a living. Due to the complex and sophisticated operations involved in a series of operations such as lighting, focusing, and film development, only people with a certain wealth and social class can leave a few photos in their lifetime.
At the end of the 70s, the "point-and-shoot camera" was invented. Compared to the complicated operation of traditional cameras, it simplifies the process of focusing and exposure, and only needs to click the shutter to record the moment in the moment. The "point-and-shoot camera" has gradually brought photography into the daily life of thousands of households.
The advent and iteration of smartphones has further simplified the process of shooting, allowing you to switch between lenses with different focal lengths without disassembly. The advent of social media has changed the social nature of images to a certain extent: in the past, it was a relatively private memory lying in a photo album; Now, it's social content that can be shared at any time.
However, "photography" is still an action that needs to be performed by humans, and all of the above innovations just make it easier and more convenient. In other words, if you want to get good-looking photos, you should follow the footsteps of photography enthusiasts, devote yourself to studying framing, composition, color grading, post-production, and upgrade professional equipment; Alternatively, you can hire a follow-up photographer and purchase a professional one-stop service.
So, is it possible that in the future, photography can also become a more machine-led automated process, like autonomous driving and generative AI, where you can get an "AI follow-up" experience between doing it yourself and asking someone to help you shoot?
In fact, such tools have been around for a long time. By arranging two or more protruding fisheye lenses on a hardware device, combined with the splicing of software and algorithms, a 360° spherical spatial video file can be obtained. Theoretically, the logic of photography becomes "shoot first and frame later". This device, called the "panoramic camera", seems to have the potential to become a new generation of "point-and-shoot cameras".
The first typical users of panoramic cameras are a group of relatively hardcore outdoor players. Thanks to the effortless shooting experience comparable to "follow-up", the panoramic camera can free up energy during the shooting process and allow users to focus more on the movement itself. Therefore, for a long time after the appearance of the panoramic camera, its image has been closely associated with the sea of stars. It has followed different hardcore outdoor players to the deep sea of snow-capped mountains, and has experienced the beauty of nature between high-altitude skydiving, wingsuit flight, and mountain rappelling; He also followed the Earth's low-earth orbit satellites to space 500 kilometers away from the Earth's ground, and recorded the appearance of the Earth from a first-person perspective.
Earth captured by the Insta360 panoramic camera
It can be said that panoramic content has spread all kinds of online videos and social platforms, but why is it that in daily life, the most popular are still traditional brands such as Fujifilm, Sony, Nikon, and even some products are so popular that they are called "electronic Moutai"?
This starts with "computing power". Because if the person who shoots can become a "fool", then the device itself needs to be a super genius. Otherwise, if you have to wait a long time to see the photo after the different lenses of the panoramic camera have finished shooting, it is obviously not a good user experience.
If you want to popularize it on a large scale, you also need to take into account portability, ease of operation, and lower the threshold of use and understanding. In the early days of panoramic photography, there were two different product routes to explore in the industry.
The first is the "Lida Brick Flying" faction, which is represented by Lytro, a star company that has been invested by Jack Ma and Tsai Chongxin. The idea is to create a large array of lenses (up to 100 cameras) on a large device, supplemented by the chips on the device itself, to generate panoramic and VR images.
The second type is portable. By installing two fisheye cameras on a device the size of a voice recorder, the effect of covering 360° is achieved. Shadowstone's first product, the Insta360 Nano, uses this approach. The ingenuity of the Nano lies in the fact that it physically connects the panoramic camera and the iPhone with hardware, making the Nano an "external hardware" of the iPhone, and by borrowing the processing and computing power of the mobile phone, it achieves the effect of improving the speed of panoramic image transmission, calculation, and stitching.
Insta360 Nano, Shadowstone's first consumer-grade panoramic camera product Shadow Stone
At CES 2016, the Nano became a star and was even praised by Apple co-founder Wozniak.
02 Use AI to lower the barrier to entry for panoramic cameras
The emergence and popularity of Nano is an ingenious combination of technology and product form, which solves the "computing" difficulty that has plagued the category of panoramic cameras for a long time. After that, Shadowstone focused its product iteration on mining the pain points of core users.
The so-called "core users", 8 years ago, were those hardcore outdoor sports players who skied, biked, dived, and downhill. They developed the habit of using action cameras at brands like GoPro, and they were curious about panoramic cameras that could shoot different effects.
Liu Jingkang, the founder of Shadowstone, once compared the company's category expansion logic to "hunters looking for prey". In his understanding of product iteration and innovation, the first priority is to solve the pain points and needs that have not been solved in the existing category.
One of the most typical innovations is that after targeting the sports crowd, Shadowstone's panoramic camera has added a selfie stick, and launched an "invisible selfie stick" mode, allowing sports players to get a selfie experience like following a shot when the film is released in the future.
In the footage captured by the Shadowstone Panorama Camera, the selfie stick is "invisible".
In September 2022, the Insta360 X3 was officially released, and by the end of 2023, it has accumulated more than one million global shipments, and Shadowstone has also continued to become the No. 1 player in the global panoramic camera field, with a market share of more than 50%.
For a commercial company that pursues innovation, the goal of the fourth generation of products can no longer be limited to a certain vertical group, and growth and breaking the circle are issues that must be faced.
The needs of the general public and the vertical group may be completely different. They care more about clarity than stability at high speeds; Compared with the complex special effects in the later stage, they are more concerned about whether the editing is simple and easy to use, and it is best to take pictures in the last second, share this second, and receive likes in the next second, like mobile phones.
This corresponds to the two previous technical problems of panoramic cameras: image quality and editing. Compared with traditional cameras or smartphones, the image of a panoramic camera will be more "mushy" because it has to capture more content in the same size. Due to format problems, the post-production project of panoramic video is complicated, and it is difficult to produce a film with one click.
The core of solving these two problems is to "improve computing power".
In terms of improving image quality, it is theoretically possible to raise the hardware standard (enlarge the canvas). However, since panoramic photos or videos need to be imported to the mobile preview, larger files will bring additional power consumption - Liu Jingkang previously said in an interview that high-quality panoramic content can only be processed smoothly on the iPhone 14, and it will become stuck when replaced by other mobile phones.
Therefore, thanks to the enhancement of the processing power of the mobile phone chip, as well as a 5nm chip carried by the new generation Insta360 X4 itself, the new generation X4 supports 8K image quality panoramic shooting without a breakthrough in photosensitive hardware, which increases the total number of pixels by 78% compared with the previous generation, and the details of the shadow have been greatly improved when imaging.
For the post-production process of the video, the solution method is divided into the following two situations.
First, if you want to quickly produce and share the film in a short period of time, you can use the new "Quick Cut Function". On the Insta360 app, you can use the joystick to switch between different viewing angles on the screen 360°, just as easy as playing a mobile game, and export without waiting.
Second, the "AI framing" function of Shadowstone's update this time has also brought good news to the "lazy people". Imagine you're taking a panoramic camera and shooting footage of a trip with a lot of friends, but there are too many angles to choose from for each lens. At this time, AI will automatically analyze the recommended materials for you, and you can easily export a high-quality video.
To sum up, while improving the computing power to achieve higher image quality, Shadowstone has also improved the post-production experience through software upgrades. Thinking about Jianying's contribution to Douyin, if it can't be combined with simple and easy-to-operate editing tools to greatly reduce the threshold for post-production, I'm afraid it will be difficult for so many grassroots vloggers to enter the short video ecosystem.
03 Smart hardware that aspires to go through cycles
Recording is one of the most important needs of human beings to inherit and express their emotional expression. The transformation of art and technology has promoted the change of the way people record their lives.
The memories of each generation are made up of different media, from books and drawing paper that are thousands of years old, to film that was born 200 years ago, to digital devices that have developed since the turn of the millennium. In the future, with the development of space devices such as Vision Pro, the memories of the next generation may no longer be just a slice of a moment or a period of time and space like photos or videos, and it is even possible to keep a time and space that actually happened, just like the meditation basin in the "Harry Potter" books, in its original form in electronic devices and can be returned at any time.
AI cannot generate memories of people in the real world, and traditional cameras cannot record real spaces in their entirety, so in the future, panoramic cameras have the potential to become a bridge between the real world and the digital space.
Going back to the scene and watching back the video are two completely different experiences. Station B up host @ orange red Iris once took Insta360 X3 to shoot a friend's wedding, and the main camera was aimed at the newlyweds as the protagonists. But when sorting out the footage in post-production, when the footage turned to the other side of the camera, I found that when everyone's goal was focused on the important moment when the bride entered, the mother in the audience was secretly wiping away tears.
It was a detail that was barely noticed by any of the on-site participants at the time, but it was captured and recorded by a panoramic camera. When the parties turned over this panoramic image many years later, it not only brought them back to the scene, but also brought them surprises and touches that they did not expect.
The panoramic camera captures the "moment of life" at the wedding Screenshot of the video
In addition to recording daily life, panoramic content can also be turned into a "time capsule" to keep the company of loved ones in the future.
After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Deng Jing, a cancer mother from Guizhou, took a series of 360° panoramic images from her son's first-hand perspective through a panoramic camera. She hopes that in the future, at many moments in her sons' lives, whether it is going out to play, reuniting for the Chinese New Year, or being admitted to university, as long as they wear VR equipment, they can return to their mothers and feel their advice, love and blessings in the "time capsule". "One day when I'm really gone, that's what they remember forever."
The essence of innovation is to meet the needs of consumers with new technology, and too many technology companies today are obsessed with the elevation of technology and ignore what people really need.
In 2022, Geek Park had an in-depth communication with Liu Jingkang, and at the end of the communication, we asked him what the biggest change in the decade of innovation was, and he mentioned that in the past, he mainly dealt with things, and in the future, he hopes to deal with "people". Because this young star entrepreneur, after starting his business for 8 years, began to realize: "If you want to do something, you can't just talk about algorithms and engineering".
From the perspective of the fourth generation of Shadowstone's products, the goal of innovation is not only focused on the technology and the product itself, but also hopes that the panoramic camera can carry more memories of users, so that the intelligent hardware products that were destined to be short-lived can establish a closer and long-term connection with users. This is true for Shadowstone and users, and probably for technology and humans.
This is the change that Liu Jingkang has brought to Liu Jingkang after many years of entrepreneurship. Maybe many years later, when he puts on his XR glasses and returns to a certain moment in his life, he will see some details that he didn't notice at the time, just like the words in his corporate mission: "Help people better record and share their lives."
*Header image source: Shadow Stone
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