This cat zoom filter is almost impossible to find. Here’s why

This cat zoom filter is almost impossible to find. Here’s why

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“Mr. Ponton, I believe the filter is activated in the video settings,” said the judge.

The weeping kitten opened its mouth, but said nothing, as its eyes darted back and forth on the screen.

“Can you hear me, judge?” Ponton asked, looking like the helpless cat.

“I’m here, live, I’m not a cat,” he said a few seconds later.

The exchange, which lasted less than a minute until the filter was turned off and Ponton recovered his human form, bounced off the Internet on Tuesday after it was posted on the court’s YouTube channel. In addition to the attacks of laughter that he invariably provoked in viewers, he presented some questions that not even Ponton could answer: How did this happen? And where can other people get this adorable cat filter?

Contacted by phone on Wednesday, Ponton – who told CNN Business that he currently does not look like a cat – was able to provide a few more details about what happened. He said he had no idea how the feline filter ended up superimposed on his face and that, while waiting for the meeting to start, his face looked normal, as he could see on his own computer monitor.

“Somehow, when I was called to court, I miraculously transformed myself into a cat,” he said.

This lasted for about 42 seconds until it was somehow turned off. At that time, he said, “it felt like forever.”

As for the cat filter, it’s not the one that’s built into Zoom, and it’s not the one you can find by searching for Snap Camera, which is a commonly used application with Zoom that can add filters (Snap calls them “lenses”) around or on your face during a video chat. It is a much older technology: some internet research led to multiple suggestions that the filter Ponton accidentally used appears to be from a tool known as Live! Cam Avatar that was used with Dell’s old webcam software called Dell Webcam Manager. A Twitter user up to published that a similar disaster happened to them during a job interview via Skype years ago.
You can see a photo of the cat in this Dell 2007 product guide for a computer monitor with an integrated webcam, which is hosted on the Dell website. “With Live! Cam Avatar, the user can disguise himself as a movie star, furry friend or any personalized animated character during the video chat”, the guide is proud, adding that he uses “intelligent face tracking” to follow the movements of the user’s head “and synchronize the lips with anything that is being said instantly.” A YouTube video from 2010 gives a good idea of ​​how it works in non-virtual court environments.

This makes sense as the source of the filter for Ponton, considering that the equipment he was using during that fateful Zoom call was, as far as he remembers, about 10 years old. He said he conducted the meeting on his secretary’s old Dell desktop computer in an office in Presidio, Texas (instead of his main office, which is in Marfa), along with a Dell monitor with a built-in webcam. (His laptop, he said, was being used elsewhere at the time, for another meeting.)

His secretary, he said, is embarrassed by the whole cat filter situation. “She wants to hide under the bed,” he said with a laugh, citing classic cat behavior.

Dell webcam software is hard to find today. But CNN Business was able to see him in action during a Zoom call with Thomas Smith, the CEO of IA photography company Gado Images and a technology journalist (and briefly, in this case, a cat). When Smith discovered that the feline filter appeared to be from old Dell webcam software, he rummaged through a box of gadgets at his home in Lafayette, California, and found a Dell laptop around 2009. He plugged it in and started up with Windows 7 and found the Dell webcam software he was looking for – complete with “the sad kitten”, as he called it.

Thomas Smith demonstrates the kitten filter during an interview with CNN Business.
Smith, who wrote about the filter for the technology website Debugger, noted that curious filter fans can find the software online and download it to their PCs (sorry, Mac users). But the software does not seem to allow you to use an avatar like a kitten over your face to broadcast live via a webcam in the same way that Ponton did accidentally, Smith said. Instead, you can record your own video of the kitten filter that appears on your face or use the filter in a video call, sharing your screen with other viewers (he did this during our call).

As for Ponton, he hasn’t been able to find the cat filter on the computer since. He tried to search for the webcam software on the old Dell computer during an interview with CNN Business, but the machine was not finished when the interview ended. If he tracks it, he said, he is planning to use it again.

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