DESIGN NAME: Shiftcam Snapgrip
PRIMARY FUNCTION: Mobile Photography Mount
INSPIRATION: With a passion for empowering mobile creatives, we aimed to create the ultimate content creator toolkit. An ecosystem of products that enhance your mobile shooting experience. By focusing on the essentials of a DSLR the Snaprgip makes shooting on your mobile phone comfortable and fun again. Whether an avid Instagrammer, crazy about TikTok, or a Facebook fan keen to share cooking skills, SnapGrip disappears within the experience and allows you to focus on what matters - Your content
UNIQUE PROPERTIES / PROJECT DESCRIPTION: SnapGrip is a compact and ergonomic mobile photography grip that utilizes the iPhone MagSafe system and provides wireless charging via a built-in battery. With a simple strong magnetic snap, the Snapgrip is quick to connect and instantly brings the comfort of a full-size grip including a shutter button for index finger shooting to your phone. A minimal design with portability in mind. The magnetic system lets you quickly switch from landscape to portrait shooting or expand with lighting or mounts.
OPERATION / FLOW / INTERACTION: Just Grip, Snap, Shoot. With the magnetic system, the SnapGrip is very intuitive in use as it automatically snaps into the correct position on your phone. Additional accessories can snap magnetically to the SnapGrip, your phone, or each other. A SnapLight beautifully illuminates your subject while the SnapPod allows you to frame your shot as a tripod or selfie stick, or just mounts a light for you. The SnapGrip ecosystem is designed to seamlessly integrate into the content creation workflow.
PROJECT DURATION AND LOCATION: The SnapGrip project started in March 2021 with concepting and preliminary engineering. In May 2022, SnapGrip was launched on Kickstarter as ShiftCam's biggest product launch yet raising over USD 840,000 with more than 6600 backers. With key project management in Hong Kong, design and engineering in the Netherlands, and assembly in China, the production of SnapGrip started in July 2022. The product will officially launch in retail in October 2022.
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PRODUCTION / REALIZATION TECHNOLOGY: Form follows function is our main design mantra and without sacrificing ergonomics and functionality we created an, as compact as possible enclosure to hold the key components. Minimizing footprint, to improve portability, the internal construction and assembly process became more challenging. As the SnapGrip holds your phone in place by magnetic force, a large part of development and research has gone into finding the correct strength that gives you that secure feeling for worry-free shooting.
SPECIFICATIONS / TECHNICAL PROPERTIES: 11cm(W) x 3.5cm(D) x 8cm(H), made from (recycled) polycarbonates plastic, thermoplastic polyurethane grip element, Magnetic mounting system, 2 PCBs with over 50 components in total, featuring Bluetooth shutter button. 5W wireless charging contains 1 lithium ion 18650 battery cell (total 3200 mAh), with 30 molded components from (recycled) polycarbonates. Includes expanding capabilities for industry-standard cold shoe mount.
TAGS: Mobile Accessories, Photography, MagSafe, Phone Grip, Content Creation
RESEARCH ABSTRACT: Reaching out to our existing customer base we created focus groups to learn more about the needs of content creators and their workflow. We realized that they are always on the go and in need of a compact, portable ad-hoc shooting system that enhances their phone. What started as only a Snapgrip rapidly evolved into an ecosystem of products. Empower the users' mobile creative workflow at every stage so that they can gear up, shoot, edit, (re)view, and share their content on the go.
CHALLENGE: SnapGrip was created with the full mobile creative workflow in mind to offer an all-rounded solution. Every component was built from the ground up to support its intended functions. Designing an ecosystem of products in times of COVID has been a challenge. With team members spread out across the globe, being able to effectively communicate engineering changes and create alignment between all stakeholders without meeting face to face has been the most challenging task we encountered.
ADDED DATE: 2022-09-02 04:53:12
TEAM MEMBERS (3) : Benson KL Chiu, Armand Vanoord and
IMAGE CREDITS: KL Chiu, 2022.
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