I’ll be presenting the app pictured above at the next GDG (Google Developer Group) Sun Coast Meetup, which takes place at Tampa Bay WaVE on Wednesday, April 19th, where I’ll talk about Android and augmented reality by walking you through FaceSpotter, an app that uses the Face API, part of Google’s Mobile Vision suite of computer vision APIs, to replicate Snapchat’s “Lenses” feature.
It identifies and locates facial features…
…and draws cartoon eyes, nose, and mustache over them. It also uses smile detection…
…and the tilt of the subject’s head…
…to decide what additional cartoon features to add to the picture:
- If the app is more than 80% confident that a face is smiling, it draws the pupils of its eyes as smiling stars.
- If a head is tilted 20 degrees or more to the left or right, it draws a tiny red hat atop it.
The app I’ll present — and yes, I’ll give you the code — is an example of augmented reality, or AR for short. “Augmented reality” is just a highfalutin’ term that describes a computer spicing up real-world images with computer-generated ones. We’ll combine it with computer facial detection, which is nothing new for humans, but still pretty new for computers, never mind handheld ones.
Writing an app like FaceSpotter used to require serious programming chops, but with the libraries that you’ll see in this presentation, you can whip up an app like it in an afternoon. You’ll learn how to:
- Incorporate the Face API into your own apps
- Programmatically identify and track human faces from a camera feed and get their location and size
- Identify points of interest, such as eyes, ears, nose, and mouth on tracked faces
- Draw augmented reality text and graphics over images from a camera feed
- Build a Snapchat Lens-like app that draws cartoony features over faces it detects in a camera feed
GDG Sun Coast is run by Mike Traverso and Scott Thisse and is the Tampa Bay chapter of Google Developer Groups, local gatherings of Google developers worldwide to discuss Google developer technologies: Android, Chrome, Drive, Google Cloud, and various APIs, including the Cast API, Maps API, and YouTube API.
Join me, Mike, and Scott at the next GDG Sun Coast Meetup, where I’ll present FaceSpotter and the code behind it in my presentation, Android and Augmented Reality!
- What: GDG Sun Coast Meetup’s Android and Augmented Reality
- Where: Wednesday, April 19, 2017, 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
- When: Tampa Bay WaVE (500 East Kennedy Boulevard, 3rd floor, Tampa)
- What to bring: You don’t really need to bring everything, but if you want to follow along (I’ll have a starter project that you can play with), bring a laptop with Android Studio, and your Android device!