Product description: Digital magic has been taking an important place in many magician's repertoire! From Inject to Digital Force Bag, more and more interesting app are coming out and Now is one of them. The idea is pretty simple, you do a research on somebody’s phone, and that will be your prediction. You ask them anything, from a city to an object, or an animal: ANYTHING. You write it down on your business card or on a blank card. Then, the spectator looks at his phone and your prediction matches perfectly. You never touch your phone, your hands never leave their sight. Is this really good? Let’s find out!
Price and where to buy it: This is sold at $55 and you can find it in nearly every Murphy's magic partner !
What you get: You get a small cardboard piece which is kind of useless because the only thing which is worth your attention is the code written on it. This code will be used to create your personal account on the app, which you can download afterward on Android or IOS. The process is quite simple, and you’re guided through the whole thing. Overall, this is done within 10 minutes. The use of the application is pretty simple, you log in and the you have several option before launching the trick. You could for example have your screen “off” if you want too as well as a confirmation of the information that is sent. This is far simpler than Inject in the use, it’s “beginner friendly” while Inject is very complete but quite complex too.
The pros and the cons: Here is the core of my review, let's begin with the cons, as I will usually be doing, I prefer to keep the good things for the end.
THE CONS:
The environment in which you work will be important, strong light on the ceiling, low luminosity can be problems for the application to work properly. And at that point, if the application doesn’t send the right information, you have no control and the trick is over.
You have to write down something at some point if you want to do the same routine shown in the trailer. However, if you have a stack of cards, postal cards or even pictures, you can get away from that.
You’ll need an internet connection, both from you and your participant.
THE PROS:
This is really close to inject the way it works, because the idea is basically the same: you make a prediction on somebody’s phone and you reveal at the end that it matches. However, the input method in Now is very clever and allow you to reveal ANYTHING, alone and without touching any phone. Thing you can’t do with Inject.
I like the fact you have several website to reveal the information, those available right now are:
Google
Wikipedia
Amazon
Youtube
Google Maps
So you have a wide variety of reveal you can do.
The prediction will be a REAL google search (or a real Wikipedia search) and even if the spectator hits the “back” button, they will land on the real google page or the real Wikipedia homepage. They won’t find anything tricky so they can’t backtrack what happened.
You could have postcards from different cities and ask them to select one, you could have superhero cards etc.. This is only limited by your imagination since everything can be revealed.
If they have the Google Maps application for example, the revelation will be shown there rather than on the Google Maps website, which I think is a very good idea.
Overall rating: I really like this app and I find it very interesting, I don’t think it will replace Inject but boy when it works, you fry minds with it! 3/4 hearts.