You can dance with Trump with this new Israeli app
Fuse.it lets users integrate animation and augmented reality into personalized, ready-to-share videos
Want to share the screen with Donald Trump, or appear in a Cardi B video? Now you can.
A new Israeli app will let you integrate animation and augmented reality into personalized, ready-to-share videos. A Tel Aviv-bred, Los Angeles-based, women-led startup team announced earlier this month the launch of fuse.it, a free app for iOS phones.
The app brings augmented reality to the smartphone, allowing users to incorporate a wide range of animated 3D characters — from fantastical monsters to an animated version of US President Donald Trump — into their personal videos, and to interact with them onscreen as well.
Building on the technology of earlier app Fusic, users can also project themselves into scenes from movies, the news or music videos, “blending” themselves into pop culture. The app is designed to track the latest developments in news, pop culture and memes, so as to allow its users to regularly insert themselves into trending topics.
“Fuse.it redefines the way people socially react to media by letting them integrate their favorite video content into their world in just one tap,” said CEO Liat Sade-Sternberg in a statement. “It allows people to become content creators, with users easily able to make viral videos from fake news clips to memes,” she said.
In an email, Sade-Sternberg said that the app is mainly aimed at teenagers, millennials and “those who love to create content.”
Fuse.it comes from the same team that in 2014 launched Fusic, an app that allows users to create videos of themselves singing duets with their favorite artists and subsequently “fuse” them with the official video. The technology of fuse.it includes Fusic’s same “sound blending” technology, and in addition can project new characters onto the scene the camera is recording, or conversely project the user onto a new background, syncing multiple audio sources into the same video, all in augmented reality.
Founded in 2011, fuse.it has 15 employees and is funded by angel investors and micro venture capitalists in the US and Israel. Sade-Sternberg was the first Israeli and the first woman to win a MIDEMLAB award in 2015, when Fusic was a winner in the “Music Discovery, recommendation & creation” category.
Market research company Statista projects that Virtual reality and augmented reality technologies will have an economic impact of $15.6 billion by 2020 and a market size of $215 billion.
“As we see augmented reality become more mainstream, so too will we see more apps that mix creative animated worlds with the real world,” said Sade-Sternberg, adding, “fuse.it is at the forefront of this technology.”
