Get the latest tech news How to check Is Temu legit? How to delete trackers
TECH
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Moju helps you get your photo mojo working

Marco della Cava
USA TODAY
Moju, an app that turns still photos into "moments in motion," has added three new features for version two, available in the Apple app store today.

SAN FRANCISCO – Mok Oh has this bug about photos. It's a love/hate thing.

He loves shooting them. But he hates how moments later they all but vanish from his life, buried in a smartphone app or on a desktop's hard-drive rarely to be seen again apart from the flash of an occasional screensaver.

"You take these shots, these memories of your life, and then you rarely consume them again," he says, eyebrows arching. "So, our mission is to make them relevant again, using algorithms to take these personalized moments and feed them back to you."

What he's talking about is Moju, a free iOS app that launched last summer but today gets a major version 2.0 refresh that adds a few cool new features.

If you're new to Moju, here's the gist: when you shoot a photo with the app, you actually take 24 frames while twisting the smartphone from side to side. That yields a moving image that seems almost like a 3D photo. The new features in the app include Moju Chat, Flashback and Face Align.

Chat is Snapchat-type experience that adds the twist effect to your conversations, while Flashback leverages information such as your kid's birthday to machine-learn what events are important to you and service up relevant photos displays from your camera roll.

But by far the most appealing upgrade is Face Align, which – to use the kid example – mines photos of a person using face-detection and then aligns them so that when you twist the phone from side to side you see the person change through time while their face remains rooted to the same spot in the frame.

Oh fires up his smartphone and has the app to retrieve shots of his daughter, and within seconds we're reliving little Olivia's last few years with the flick of his wrist. Her smiling face is a fixture while her wardrobe and the settings are in constant exciting flux. It's a bit like she's growing up in front of your eyes.

Mok Oh, co-founder of Moju, aims to resurface our photos in emotionally significant ways with the lastest version of his free app.

"What we're most excited about is applying predictive power to things that make matter to people," says Oh. "Computers are good at pattern recognition, so why not leverage that?"

Oh, who has a PhD in computer graphics and computer vision from MIT, served as PayPal's chief scientist for a number of years after a mapping company he was part of in Boston was bought by the payments giant in 2011. When he decided it was time to "scratch the start-up itch," he called upon an MIT buddy, Justin Legakis, and the two got to work on Moju.

After bootstrapping the startup for a few years, the duo raised $1 million from a range of investors, including Eduardo Saverin, who, per The Social Network, helped fund Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook during its early Harvard days. Moju launched in the Apple app store last June; an Android version is coming.

"We want to disrupt the consumption of photos," he says. "If we can predict which memories can make you happy, we think we'll have a winning product."

But what about a lucrative one? Oh nods. "There are commercial applications, too," he says.

Oh holds up his iPhone 6 Plus and clicks on the feed of a user who has taken time-lapse photos of a series of outfits that change whimsically as he turns the screen side to side. One can immediately image the sales potential of such a display for a clothing company, as it instantly makes looking at a static ad in the pages of a magazine seem boring by comparison.

Oh just smiles, then returns to the photos of little Olivia.

Featured Weekly Ad