It’s winter in the southern hemisphere at the moment but Auckland is not far enough south to hibernate! You may be wondering – what is going on?

The goal is still to launch HiLO Lens on Kickstarter. There have been several unforeseen delays in the pre-production samples. This is very frustrating because the iPhone 5  is looming. But such is life.

We needed to remake one of the lenses due to a production error. The lens is finished but led to a problem being discovered in the aluminium optics container tolerances. So those parts are being fixed now.

After sharing more about the project – images and the demo animation – we got a better feeling for the interest in a product like HiLO Lens. Certainly there are a number of keen iPhoneographers who want to see the product developed. At the same time you can see the Facebook page has 279 fans – which is a lot less than Justin Bieber’s 45 million even if I think HiLO Lens is cooler!

The make or break of HiLO Lens is going to be getting the word out about the product. It is a niche so we can’t rely on a lot of buzz. This challenge has been keeping me busy (you can read worried) while waiting on the pre-production samples.

Earlier we launched a Sweepstakes (for one of the infamous pre-production samples of HiLO Lens) and I’ve been underwhelmed with the response. We’ve contacted a lot of bloggers and review sites but most are interested in seeing the product. We need to have the Kickstarter campaign succeed to make the product. Chicken and egg…

So the idea of an App came up. The HiLO Lens app includes a cool technology for correcting lens distortion. The same approach can be used for other lenses.

So we have developed OlloCorrect which is an App that corrects for distortion and vignetting introduced by the Olloclip add on lens. The Olloclip is one of the most popular add-on lenses for the iPhone. If someone has bought an Olloclip then there is a good chance they will be interested in the HiLO Lens. So we make a brief mention of the HiLO Lens in the OlloCorrect app and will be giving away the OlloCorret App for a limited time.

You can see some screenshots of  OlloCorrect in action.

OlloCorrect has been submitted to the App store (today!). So this will be a valuable experience for the HiLO Lens app too.

If you are dying to try OlloCorrect then let me know. I can organize for you to join the Beta testing team to access the App now.