Innovative chat app Spin gives video chat a different perspective

Interaction with each other and the current world around everyone is the difference between Spin and other chat services. Rather than talking heads, its default video chat setting points through the rear camera.

“I personally don’t think [the future] is about big data, I think it’s about people uniquely and emotionally connecting,” says Tara Lemmey, whose work as a technologist goes from a faculty post at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine to a national security task force. “To me, it’s all about the emotional connection–everything I’ve ever worked on.”

And for the last four years, what Lemmey and her company, Net Power & Light, have been working on is Spin, a technology intended to break the talking-head format of video-conferencing products like Skype. On Monday, it will release a free iOS app that allows up to 10 people to share a virtual environment via video chat.