Featured Image Credit: Dmitry Marchenko/Kalki/Alamy
Topics: TikTok, Apple, Technology
Aisha Nozari
When a TikToker named Kalina uploaded a video telling her 566,000 followers that Apple has been ‘editing’ their faces on FaceTime, many were quick to thank her, leaving comments like: “I knew it! I thought I was making it up in my head!”
In her clip, Kalina could be seen waving her finger over her eyes while using FaceTime, prompting her appearance to glitch slightly and in turn revealing her image was being edited.
She wrote across her post: “So Apple edits your face when you’re on FaceTime to make it look like you’re looking higher at the screen.”
Rolling her eyes, Kalina added: “As someone who already has big eyes, I don’t appreciate Apple changing my appearance.”
The social media user’s followers were quick to comment on her post, with one person writing: “Everyone was gaslighting me telling me it wasn’t real.”
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Someone else penned: “I saw my eyes glitch when I was recording myself and was so confused!” while another added: “Honestly I thought I was going crazy.”
Tyla has reached out to Apple for comment.
Another TikToker pointed out that Kalina’s appearance was being altered by Apple’s iOS feature ‘Eye Contact’, which basically lets users fake eye contact with whoever they’re FaceTiming if they happen to be multitasking.
The person wrote: “It makes my eyes look bizarre, you can turn it off in settings under FaceTime [...] go to settings, FaceTime, scroll down, turn ‘eye contact’ off.”
Apple’s Eye Contact feature was part of its iOS 14 update, which was made available over summer.
According to Business Insider, Apple uses ARKit software for its Eye Contact feature.
The framework basically combines motion tracking and scene processing to create an ‘AR experience’ - in this case, eyes looking in a different direction.
The Eye Contact feature also lets users’ eyes look directly at the phone’s front-facing camera using real-time augmented reality and works on multiple faces in the call.
Apple first tested out the feature back in 2019, calling it the ‘FaceTime Attention Correction’.
At the time, tech enthusiast Will Sigmon tweeted about the update, and his followers were quick to point out how ‘weird’ they thought the feature was.
“F**k this is weird s**t,” wrote one person, with another echoing: “It is sooooo wild.”
“WHAT? HOW?” tweeted another social media user. Someone else simply said: “Mad times” and another added: “Such a bad use of technology.”