Ovi App Spotlight: eyeCall

GLOBAL – Each week we’ll be nudging a shy Ovi Store app into the limelight, kick-started last week with the smart I Parked Here app that recently came to our attention. This week, I stumbled across an intriguing software nugget called eyeCall – it’s particularly interesting from a gesture control point of view (Nokia gesture design has been a hot topic on Conversations lately). See, eyeCall is a simple third party app that lets you silence incoming calls and send an automated text message with a couple of easy-to-remember hand gestures. I’ve just downloaded it to N97 and given it a go, so read on to find out how it works.

The concept couldn’t be simpler. The idea is that you’re sat in a meeting, your phone starts ringing and you wave your hand across the face of the device to silence it without touching it (it uses the front camera to detect your hand). Once it’s stopped ringing you cover the phone with your hand for a couple of seconds and this triggers an automatic text message to be sent to the person who was calling you.

The app costs £3 here in the UK, so I decided to give it a go. Once you’ve downloaded the app from the Ovi Store and sucked it down on to your device it lets you tweak the settings, so you can choose if you want to make one or both of the hand gestures active (they run in the background so you don’t need to open eyeCall to make it work). You’ve also got the option to edit your automatic SMS reply.

I was a little skeptical, so I asked my wife to call my phone. It started ringing, I waved my hand across the N97 and it went silent (I had to do it twice, as it only seems to work if you wave quite slowly). Tick! Then I placed my hand on the device and it discreetly vibrated after a couple of seconds to let me know that an SMS had been sent to her. And true enough she received it within moments. Not bad.

Here’s the video from eyeSight, the crowd responsible for the eyeCall app…

What do you reckon to it? And are there any other Ovi Store apps you’ve been using that you’d recommend we showcase here on Conversations? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Tags | app, eyeCall, eyeSight, Gestures, Ovi Store, Spotlight