Finding The Perfect Tattoo Before Fully Committing
When someone gets a tattoo, it can sometimes be difficult to decide on the right one, especially since once you get the tattoo, your stuck with it for life. With the app InkHunter, that’s not a problem now. This app is perfect for tattoo enthusiasts and artists who want to try various designs out with no regrets later on. Available for download on apple and android handheld-devices, this app uses augmented reality (AR)to help you visualize and take photos of various tattoo designs anywhere on your body in real-time. You can use any design in the vast gallery, or you can even create a design yourself to see how it looks. If you don’t want an illustration tattoo design, InkHunter also has an option to create your own text tattoo within the app.
What’s This App Like?
When I first opened InkHunter, it gave a small slideshow with instructions of how to use the app. The instructions said to draw a square smile on the part of your skin that you would like the tattoo to be and choose a design from the gallery or make your own. Then using the camera on the app, your chosen tattoo will appear on your skin in place of the square smile. After exiting the slideshow, a gallery opens up with a large variety of tattoo designs. There is a search bar at the top of the gallery to help you find a specific design. There's even a “favorite” system where you tap the heart of your favorite designs, and InkHunter saves them for you in the “my tattoos” gallery. On the top left, there also is a menu bar that has a few links to the company’s Instagram, asking for feedback, terms of use, and a booking of tattoo artists in the U.S. There's also the camera, with the “box smile sensor” and it’s helpful use of tracking where you drawn the box smile on your body, that’ll let you take photos and keep them in a “my photos” gallery on the app to look at later.
Some Strengths Of The App
The app has a very large variety of tattoo designs that give people many options or easy access if they are looking for something specific. It’s also very cool that you can make your very own tattoo, whether it be an illustration or text design, and get to view it on the desired location on your body. I liked how simple and sleek the logo and design of the app was, along with how it shows you simple instructions when you first download it.
Improvement Needed
This might have been my fault, but I didn’t know where the camera was on the app until I randomly picked a design and pressed the try button. Although the slideshow of instructions tells you to take a photo, it didn’t really say where to find the camera. I feel that they should just have the camera as one of the options to see and use at the bottom navigational bar with “my tattoos, tattoos gallery, and my photos” options. I also don’t think that they should have an outside link to try to book tattoo artists in the United States. It seems easier to be able to just send a direct message or have the tattoo’s artist contact information on profiles within the app. Although this app tells you the names of different tattoo designs, it doesn’t have actual profiles for any of the tattoo artists or yourself. There are some artist’s who’s names are linked to their social media, but I feel like having actual profiles on the InkHunter app would be easier.
S.L.A.M & Tracking Technology
With the help of S.L.A.M and tracking technology, it could improve the InkHunter app to be even better than what it currently is now. S.L.A.M could collect data from the app’s camera to determine the location of the user’s arm, and the “square smile” target marker where the user would like to see their “tattoo” on their body. And since the object, or the user’s arm, would most likely be in almost constant motion, you would need the tracking technology dynamic registration for constant tracking.
Summary
Nobody wants to get something that they won’t like in the end so with some minor bumps, overall, this is a really great and helpful app for all tattoo artists and enthusiasts. I think with some more improvements, in the future, InkHunter could be even better than it is now. Here are some links below to the apple store and google play store to download this app now for free.
