On Tuesday, Boulder-based Occipital, LLC released ClearCam, an iPhone application with the capability of doubling the phone’s camera resolution from two to four megapixels by merging information from up to six exposures. Along with improved picture quality, ClearCam allows the user to zoom to a much greater degree than Apple’s default software when viewing photographs on the phone’s 320 by 480 pixel screen. The feature suite of this application closes out with QuickShot mode, which takes four photographs in two seconds, saves the sharpest, and discards the other three.
Occipital, a TechStars graduate from the class of 2008, is serious about image software, having developed technology for image recognition, image tagging, and creating 3-D photographs by combining a series of static photographs. ClearCam, the company’s first product, is an obvious beneficiary of this early work: “We rewrote everything above the drivers,” explains co-founder Jeffrey Powers. ClearCam thus improves the resolution of a photograph on the processing end, and it does so by first taking six photographs in roughly the same amount of time the default camera software takes one. ClearCam then runs all the captured images through an interpolation algorithm, whereby the software stacks the photographs on top of one another, aligns them, and proceeds to average the sub-pixel differences among the set. The outcome is enhanced resolution twice that of the regular camera, including sharper edges and more accurate capture of colors.
ClearCam is currently available on jailbroken iPhones, as Occipital has yet to apply to the Apple App store. In the process of providing the cleanest image possible the team bumped up against (and may have slightly tripped over) Apple’s guidelines pertaining to the camera, and therefore put out a Cydia version while they straighten out the fine print with the App Store. A free version of ClearCam can be downloaded from Cydia, and users can try all the features for 15 days. In its first two days, ClearCam had over 100,000 downloads. The full version can be purchased for $9.99 on the company’s website.
As an iPhone application, the great promise of Occipital is the technology’s scalability. Were Apple to improve upon the camera in generation 3, the company believes it could adapt ClearCam to consistently double an image’s resolution, from three to six or four to eight, whatever the case may be. And with provisional patents in place to protect their labor, iPhone photographers will likely be aware of Occipital for many years to come.
