Final Major Project: Smartphone Research

In my last post I talked about how the picture quality of the face will determine the effectiveness of my mechanic. The tests I carried out in the last post proved that poor quality photographs will not be suitable as a source, but the source I used came from a Blackberry Curve 8500, the bog standard Blackberry, which has a very dissapointing camera compared with the smartphones that are on the market right now.

Camera Research:

I've been looking at a lot of sample pictures from smartphone cameras, including the top Apple, HTC, Samsung and Blackberry smartphones. Apple and HTC smartphones are the ones I'd primarily target as application development is huge within these two brands, HTC especially, as it is free and easy to put your apps up on the HTC store.

I used a photograph from Blackberry Curve 8500 camera in attempt to create a good face texture, but failed, as camera, and picture quality is very poor.

I carried out another test with a good quality picture and the results were great.

So evidently, photographs of equal quality are recommended for a great texture that can be used in game. I've taken the time to study sample pictures of Apple and HTC smartphones, as well as others, and it's safe to say that most of them will do the job, easily.

A website named 'engadget' carried out an experiment with a number of smartphones to determine which has the best quality camera. They spent the weekend shooting around New York City with the iPhone 4S, along with some other top smartphones like the iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S II, Nokia N8 and HTC's Amaze 4G.

There are a large number of photographs portrayed in a slideshow on the website, including comparison pictures. Click here to see the slideshow.

From just a quick glance at each of the images, it is clear that the quality from all 5 smartphones are far more than adequate to use when creating a texture for a face, which is exactly what I aim to create. As I mentioned earlier, the picture quality needed to be pretty much as good as the 'average face' photograph, and it surely is.

Even though these smartphones are fairly new and and far from cheap, my game concept wouldn't be perfectly ready and on the market for some time, leaving time for these smartphones to come down in price, therefore being more accessable to the general public, creating a broader audience for my game mechanic.

Here are some other sample pictures I gathered from around the internet...

iPhone 4S: