Face Melter is a great example of how a developer can take control of some of the powerful technology that's built into the iPhone's OSX and let you control it with a very simple interface. This liquid art app by Nico Becherer uses some of the built in features of Apple's Core Image. (Core Image is an invisible image engine built into OSX, just waiting for developers to toy with.)
Use of Face Melter is simple: Smudge with your finger and unpinch or pinch to magnify or demagnify an area. The Back button is a liquid undo that allows you to unsmudge with our finger. This can be useful for restoring the edges of the canvas if you've pulled them too far in. To unmelting the image: just shake your iPhone like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can use images from your albums, camera roll or call up the camera and shoot from inside the app.
Face Melter is $2. If you (God forbid) hand your iPhone over to your kids for entertainment, this one is probably more entertaining than any game. Even the really young get the hang of this quickly and love abusing the faces of loved ones. But I cringe at the thought of a tot shaking a little too hard and an iPhone flying out a pediatrician's office window.
While powerful, Face Melter has its limitations. It's designed to warp your Contact images and limits output to screen size. I'd like to see it work with the 2 megapixel camera-size images that the iPhone produces. The shake feature is a little cumbersome at the moment. It takes about the same amount of time as pressing the undo button and unsmudging the entire image.
For the price, this is a very cool little app.
Tip:
- Fill the screen with faces when taking pictures that you're planning on using with Face Melter or Contacts.
- The effect looks cooler when you put people against a plain background as in the example photo. You won't get a melted background, just a melted face.
- Use a Pogo Stylus for better control.
