Prisma, the photo manipulation app that uses neural networks to regenerate users' images in the styles of famous artists and paintings, marks a big upgrade today. The iOS Prisma app is being updated to allow offline processing of images for the first time, taking away much of the frustration around needing an internet connection and waiting for overloaded servers to catch up. The initial update won't include all of Prisma's filters, but it does at least lay the foundation for making the app self-sufficient.
"Now that we’ve implemented neural networks right to the smartphones," says the Moscow-based team behind Prisma, "we have enough servers capacity to run full videos on them in the near future." Prisma Labs promises "repainting" times will be cut down to 5 seconds on the iPhone 6S / 6S Plus or a little longer on the iPhone 6 family. When queried about the battery drain of doing the full processing on the phone itself, the company said battery life shouldn't be noticeably different as using cloud processing was already a rather demanding process. The Android version of Prisma will be getting a matching update in the very near future, probably as early as next week.
Update: Prisma got in touch to amend its processing times, which were initially stated as 3 seconds or less, but have now been bumped up to 5 seconds.