bunnyhero dev

While playing with the new AVFoundation APIs, it occurred to me that in iOS 4, apps can now easily access the camera with no feedback to the user. Before, apps had to use UIImagePickerController, which shows the iris-opening animation before recording starts, even if you hide the preview image using cameraViewTransform. With AVFoundation’s AVCaptureSession, there is no indication to the user at all that the camera is in use unless the app provides its own. There is no permission alert, nor any LED indicator like a webcam. An app could secretly be recording your face with the iPhone 4’s front-facing camera and sending it to who knows where. I wonder if Apple’s app review team checks for this in some way?

On the other hand, the new APIs make it much easier to integrate non-photo-taking uses of the camera into an app. I could imagine using the iPhone 4’s front camera for non-touch gesture controls or facial expression recognition. Makes me wish I knew something about real time image processing!

iOS 4 added a lot to AVFoundation, including classes and APIs that give you much more control over the iPhone camera. One of the things you can now do with the camera is read the video frame data in real time.

In this post, I’ve created a simple demo that simulates a Twilight-style vampire. In the Twilight series, vampires aren’t hurt by daylight; instead, they sparkle. Yes, sparkle.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the app:

And here’s a low-quality video of the vampire simulator in action.

The app detects the amount of light shining on the phone by doing very simple image analysis of the incoming video frames from the camera. The brighter the image seen by the camera, the more sparkles it draws on the vampire.

So how does this all work?
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