A look at Huawei’s Nova 3i/P Smart+ AI camera and AR capabilities

Huawei recently released the P Smart+ in Europe, coming with its new Kirin 710, introducing AR capabilities to its mid-range line-up.

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Huawei’s P Smart+ recently launched in Europe, coming with the new mid-range SoC of the company, the Kirin 710, replacing the aging Kirin 659. It is expected that this Kirin 710 will also be found on the upcoming Mate 20 Lite, as well as the next P Lite next year, if we follow the logic of the Chinese manufacturer.

To try and seduce consumers into buying the P Smart+, Huawei has shown some interesting features from its selfie camera, which, as a reminder, is composed of a 24 MP sensor and a 2 MP sensor for depth. Thanks to the Kirin 710 and its AR capabilities, Huawei is bringing what they call “3D Qmoji”, essentially 3D animations, similar to what Apple already does on their iPhone.

In any case, this article will just look very quickly at these 3D animations, which, to be honest, are pretty cool overall. We start with the “3D Qmoji”, which use the selfie camera to produce an animated version of the user’s face with one of the animals present. These animations can be turned into gifs and be used on chats or social media, with some of the animals offered being a dog, penguin, cat, a robot or even some kind of cherry with headphones.

The recognition by the software is not the best, but the results are satisfying for the price paid.

Moving to the 3D animations, there are 5 different options, all 5 being some kind of penguin doing funny things. The size of the 3D object can be modified, to make it fit with the environment, giving some interesting results. It is also possible to grab and move the object around. In the first three images, we can see the penguin bothering us in our offices at DRSC Media, going as far as exposing some of our preparations on complex future articles. Yes, part of this sentence was indeed a joke:

In the two following videos, we can see the object on the street. These two short videos were taken close to the Huawei Customer Experience Store in Brussels:

Finally, the penguin can dance on the furniture while waiting for your turn. Sadly, it can’t dab on the haters, nor dab on the people waiting in front of you. A shame. As it can be heard in one of the videos, the animation did make laugh one of the employees of the store, so they do have some kind of entertainment value:

It is worth noting these animations were “jointly developed by Baidu AR & Huawei”, with Baidu being the equivalent of Google Search in China.

To finish this article, the selfie camera can also delete the background in real-time and superpose an effect. The phone comes preloaded with a few of them, but it is also possible to use your own pictures. While the technology is not yet there and the results aren’t perfect, it’s actually amazing that the device is capable of cutting the person out and putting a background in real time, with some rather acceptable results. Sadly, as we all would like to preserve our privacy and identity, we’ve decided to place a giant cake on the face of each person. Regardless, the background effect can be observed without any trouble:

For those wondering, the only face not hidden forms part of a P20 series advertisement.

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