HTC EYE Experience: Designed for Users

HTC EYE Experience: Designed for you

It’s not just about the hardware though. The HTC EYE Experience takes mobile imaging software into a new league with unique features guaranteed to make you look your best.
Taking video chat and conference calls to a new level of quality and performance, the HTC EYE Experience’s face tracking keeps you perfectly framed at all times. And because staying in touch means more than just talking to a single person, up to four people in the same room can also be tracked comfortably, with each face cropped and positioned on the screen for maximum clarity. So enjoy the freedom and flexibility of services like Skype without worrying about exactly where you or your friends are standing, as the camera will follow everyone.
The HTC EYE Experience opens up a new world of creative opportunity, thanks to the new Split Capture function. Combining simultaneous photos and videos taken on the front and back cameras into one split-screen image or video, this creates a new selfie experience, allowing you to document your journey and your reaction without relying on thumbnail views.
Crop-Me-In places you at the heart of the action by cropping you from the image or video taken with the front-facing camera and positioning it within the scene captured by the main camera, opening the door to more extreme, exciting selfies and videos.
Voice Selfie removes the need for awkward hand contortions by enabling you to trigger the shutter release with a simple command. Simply “say cheese” as soon as you’ve struck the perfect pose or trigger the video recording with “action” or “rolling” commands.
Popular additions to the HTC Desire 820 are also included in the HTC EYE Experience such as face fusion technology, allowing you to merge your face with that of a friend or celebrity for a completely original look and Live Makeup, where you can set the desired level of skin smoothing and preview the effect in real-time before the image is captured.
The HTC EYE Experience features will roll out to the following models in the coming months: HTC One (M7), HTC One (M8), HTC One E8, HTC One mini, HTC One mini 2, HTC One max, HTC Desire 816, HTC Desire 820 and HTC Butterfly 2. Learn more about HTC EYE Experience and its features, here.

Zoe: Life as you experience it

With the new Zoe collaborative video-editing app it’s easy to remix your photos and videos into stylish highlight reels, with beautiful themes and soundtracks that can be shared. Allowing friends to remix their content with yours, Zoe creates the ultimate highlight video for you to enjoy and share through your favorite social networks.
In August, we launched Zoe (beta).  With Zoe 1.0, we bring flexibility to the community, enabling short, medium and long Zoes that can be made up of just a couple of still images, or an entire series of video clips, with its new content engine (coming later this year), making it easy to present small numbers of clips or even individual images in an interesting, visually stunning way.
Integrating fully with RE, Zoe video highlights are automatically generated and ready to share. There is no need to edit, no need to sync to your computer, just simply upload them with a single touch.
Zoe is a free app available on Android now, and coming on iOS later this year.

We’ve already shared how Sense TV brings an interactive TV guide and universal remote control to your HTC One.  But that isn’t all, the HTC One’s infrared (IR) blaster is also open to developers for integration into their own amazing apps.
A great example of this is the “Smart IR Remote for HTC One” app from Color Tiger, a Palo Alto-based development company. Where HTC’s Sense TV focuses on simplicity and controlling your entertainment system, Color Tiger’s Smart IR Remote is a sophisticated tool for power-users who want the most flexibility from their IR remote.
I spent some time chatting with the developers from Color Tiger on their new app:

What is the Smart IR Remote?

Sergiu Dogaru: Smart IR Remote is an app built solely to replace the multitude of remotes in everyone’s house with only one remote, available as an app on something that’s already always in your hands: your phone. And because it’s running on such a marvelous piece of hardware, we are trying to make it much more than just a remote replacement. You can now make your phone do multiple remote actions with the touch of a single button (like turning on all your devices at once), but buttons of multiple remotes on a single screen and arrange them to your liking, and even let your phone mute your TV or Home Theater when your phone rings!

What gave you the idea for the app?

Sergiu: When we first found out that the HTC One will include an IR Blaster, we just knew that this is going to be big. The idea simply popped into our heads, and we knew we had to do it. So we started working on it, a little over a month before the HTC One would officially be available for people in the stores, so they would be able to use our app from the first minute. And we did.

What was the most difficult part of developing the app?

Sergiu:  Well, we can certainly say that integrating the HTC Sense SDK with IR support was the easiest. As for the most difficult, there isn’t something in particular we would say it was difficult.
We’ve been doing Android for 5 years, so now the only real challenge was building a product that’s powerful and customizable, while still being simple and really easy to use. That kind of balance is really hard to achieve, and no matter how close your app gets to it, there’s always room for better, so we’re working on that!

What was involved in using the IR API? What was your experience like?

Sergiu: Since the HTC One is a feature-complete phone when it comes to the IR, and HTC provides us access to all the features, we’ve tried to make best use of every capability in the phone. Integrating the SDK was extremely easy (it literally took us only 15 minutes), and we can honestly say it’s one of the easiest android SDKs we’ve ever integrated in our apps.
On top of all these, we’d like to say that we believe that building Smart IR Remote for the HTC One was one of the best ideas we’ve had in a long time, and we’re really happy with the results. We only wish more people knew about it!