Zmarties

GlassesDirect offer a feature they call CustomEyes which allows you to "try on" the glasses they offer online. It works by you uploading a photo of your face, and then you can overlay an image of the glasses on top of that.

Unfortunately they don't really use the power of the computer in doing this. CustomEyes is a silly little Flash application, whereas this could all have been done in far more accessible HTML. You currently get to see a small image of your face, and then have to select the frame you want to see by name from a drop down. The Flash controls do allow you to rotate the glasses - but who wants to see glasses that are rotated off of the horizontal anyway? In addition, they also allow the glasses to be resized, which is necessary since you they don't know in advance what sized face image you have uploaded - but is doubly necessary because they don't even make all the glasses images the same size - some are twice the size of others!

I'd suggest that the application could be much improved by doing the following:

• do away with the Flash, and make this a straightforward dynamic HTML page
• select from an illustrated list of frames, rather than simply by text name
• for each frame that you select, add a new copy of the uploaded image to the page, so that you can actually fill the page with images that you can compare side by side, or which you can print out and compare that way
• either automatically recognise where the eyes are in the image when it is uploaded, or ask to be told once, and thereafter make sure that all the images of the frames are scaled to be the correct size to fit.