Me in 2D!


Me in 2D!
October 4, 2014

For class this week our assignment was to evaluate a mobile application on our smartphones. I recently downloaded FaceQ from the Apple App Store after I saw so many people creating cute little 2D versions of themselves.

FaceQ is free to download, offered in a long list of languages and will take up 28.5MB on your device. I did some investigating and you are also able to download this application for Android. Blackberry users have also had some success with running the Android application on their phones.

If there is one thing that I am terrible at–it’s drawing. Somehow the ideas I have in my head never translate correctly to paper–always a likely story. What I enjoyed about FaceQ is that I had the opportunity to create a “drawing” of myself without having to actually move a pencil around. In the end, I still was able to produce the same result–a fun cartoon!

Unlike many apps that are available today, FaceQ does not include any advertising banners on any of its screens. I have never been a fan of the pop up ads that you accidentally click when you are trying to click on a button or link inside of an app–so this was actually refreshing to me!

FaceQ

Figure 1. The welcome screen on FaceQ

This particular application was a really fun and easy service to use because there was a wide assortment of different features that you could pick for your cartoon self. You had everything from hair styles, hair colors, eyes, lips, noses, outfits and skin tones. The facial features range from being rather normal looking to right out cartoonish; it would be almost effortless to create a caricature highlighting one of your friends’ visual quirks. For example, I decided to create my Dad. He has a giant mustache so I wanted to make sure his avatar had the perfect facial hair. Another trait he posses is that he always wears his sunglasses–even indoors. By the time I was finished, my Dad looked more like Borat.

Figure 2. My Dad in real life, the cartoon I created of him and Borat.

One feature that I did find that was a drawback was being unable to control the color of the avatar’s makeup and clothing. When you are finished creating your work of art you can upload it to one of your social networking accounts, send it via email or save it to your phone.

This application is for pure entertainment purposes and offers no coupons, discounts or interaction with other users. There is no usefulness beyond that–unless you need a special cartoon-ized character for clipart. If nothing else, you get a pretty rad 2D masterpiece!

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Tags: cartoon, FaceQ, MMC5427, smartphone app

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