Simple Augmented Reality (AR) no longer needs sophisticated computers or software, with a new app offering ‘copy and paste’ ease to creating realistic images.
The new app, ClipDrop, allows anyone to use their phone’s camera to quickly grab snaps of surrounding objects and paste them into desktop apps. It is a smart twist on traditional AR, allowing you to make the physical world digital, unlike AR which projects digital images onto the physical world around you.
The app which is available on free trial in beta form allows you to photograph everything around you and to quickly import the image into documents as cropped objects, cleanly extracting it from any ungainly backgrounds.
The tool lets you import images and even text from books, for example, into a variety of software and websites, including Google Docs, PowerPoint, Figma, Canva, and Pitch, as well as in Photoshop (where ClipDrop has a plugin available to allow objects to be dropped in as a new layer with an editable mask). Of course, you can also just use the app to grab images of everyday objects around you to share as you normally would within iOS and Android.
In addition to the iOS and Android apps, the software is also available for Windows and macOS, letting you grab images and text from your desktop or the web and quickly import them into documents.
The concept of ClipDrop, which first emerged as a tech demo back in May, attracted a lot of attention from technophiles. The developers of the app, Cyril Diagne and Jonathan Blanchet, said they have spent the last few months turning this early demo into a commercial product, and that they had over 100,000 people registered on their beta waiting list wanting to try out the software.
Although ClipDrop is now publicly available, the developers have warned that it is still in beta form and that early users should expect some “bugs and rough edges.”
You get five free photo clips with a download of the software, but clipping more requires a subscription. ClipDrop is currently priced at $39.99 for a year, but after 20 November the price will rise to $79.99 a year, or $9.99 a month.