At the HTC Double Exposure event earlier this morning where the Desire EYE smartphone and RE camera were unveiled, the company also introduced EYE Experience, a suite of camera software features that allows for plenty of creative applications.
The EYE Experience from HTC will first be available on the Desire EYE, bringing along several new features. We briefly covered these features in our earlier announcement post, and here’s a closer look at EYE Experience.
One of the most impressive features found on the EYE Experience is Face Tracking. It really doesn’t sound like much, but HTC has taken the core function of face tracking and boosted it with HTC’s unique imaging solution specifically for the high-resolution front-facing camera on the Desire EYE. With the ultra-wide angle lens, the sensor maintains focus on the user’s face at all times, and will even keep the user’s entire face in the frame even when the camera is moving.
Split Capture, on the other hand, is a little more gimmicky in its application. Essentially, Split Capture enables simultaneous recording on both the front and rear cameras, and displays footage on both sides in a split 50:50 ratio frame.
On the other hand, a quick tap on a video call enables Screen Share, which lets users share a real-time recording of the screen during video calls, making it easy and seamless to share more content to other users.
Face Fusion, as its name implies, combines two user-selected faces taken with the camera into one eerie amalgamation of the two faces. A slider at the bottom of the screen lets you choose how much of the two faces will be in the final composition. HTC jokes that this could be a useful tool to find out how a couple’s child would grow up to look like, but many in the event hall can already picture this feature being a popular party piece.
Crop Me In only activates when the front camera detects a face; once it cannot detect one, the effects immediately go away.
Finally, Crop Me In is another goofy feature in the EYE Experience. What it does is to crop the user’s face and shoulders from the front facing camera and superimpose it onto the frame of the rear camera, all in real time. The result is another odd-looking amalgamation that really feels like it belongs as a mode in a South Korean phone maker’s suite of gimmicky camera modes.
In any case, the HTC EYE Experience will be pre-loaded into the camera app of the new Desire EYE, while One M8 users can expect a software update for this feature later in the coming month.
In addition, HTC also announced that starting today, the Zoe app is officially out of its beta stage and is now available on the Google Play Store. This Instagram-like app lets users post beautifully-crafted images and video footage of a specific event or location using Zoe’s rendering engine. And, users can also collaborate on a Zoe to create even more interesting Zoe clips.
The HTC Zoe app can now be downloaded from the Google Play Store, and supports all Android devices running on Android 4.3 and above. Meanwhile, an iOS version of the app will be available by the end of this year.
