Grand St., a community for well-crafted personal technology, built a Google+ Party Mode Photobooth that combined social tools with an old-fashioned booth. Their ‘Party Hacking’ project aimed to provide an interactive and engaging experience for partygoers.

The group used Google+ Party Mode, which enables people to share photos with an entire party in real-time. They built an open standing booth with a camera sat on a tripod.

An outline on the floor showed people where to stand to have their photograph taken. To trigger the camera, a wireless RF button was mounted to the wall so it could be self-service.

The Photobooth automated the uploading of images to a Google+ Event and was connected to a computer that checked for new photos at regular intervals. A live stream of these incoming photos was shown on screens throughout the apartment.

The group also used gloss paper pre-cut into strips and a regular photo printer to print photos for guests to take home. Grand St. has open-sourced the code and wrote a detailed blog post about the Photobooth hack so others could also build their own.

Grand St.