Ammar Hassonjee – Looking Outwards 12

For this looking outwards, I found two projects that relate to webcam art or are interactive program that overlay over a photo.

The first project I found is called Webcam Toy, a website that takes selfies using a variety of photo filters that react to the figure in the frame. Webcam Toy is developed by Paul Neave, a British based programmer and designer who has been designing for over 20 years and focuses on making playful software that incorporates imagination. Webcam Toy has a bunch of filters that warp and mirror the camera at different point of the canvas, and also draws elements on top of the webcam, such as fire or snow that falls on top of the person’s head.

The second project I found is a website called BeFunky, which takes a photo as an input, and has a number of options for effects and filters that can be applied to the image. Some of these filters involve detecting different color gradients in the image and recoloring them. This project was developed by the BeFunky team that is a group of software developers who were motivated to create a tool that lets anyone recreate beautiful photographs without having to learn technical software like Adobe Photoshop.