That cat zoom filter is almost impossible to find. This is why

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“Mr. Ponton, I believe you’ve enabled a filter in the video settings,” the judge said.

The tearful kitten opened his mouth, but said nothing, his eyes darting back and forth on the screen.

“Can you hear me, Judge?” Ponton asked, looking like the abandoned feline.

“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 regained his human form, bounced around the internet Tuesday after it was posted on the court’s YouTube channel. Aside from the fits of laughter it invariably evoked in viewers, it posed some questions that even Ponton couldn’t answer: How did it happen? And where can other people get that cute cat filter?

Ponton, who could be reached by phone on Wednesday, told CNN Business that he didn’t look like a cat at the moment, and could provide some more detail on what had happened. He said he had no idea how the cat filter got on his face, and that while he waited for the meeting to start, his face looked normal, as he could see it on his own computer screen.

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

This took about 42 seconds until it somehow shut down. That time, he said, “seemed like an eternity.”

The cat filter is not built into Zoom, nor is it one you can find by searching for Snap Camera, an application commonly used with Zoom that can add filters (Snap calls them ‘lenses’) around or on top your face during a video chat. It turns out to be much older technology: some internet research led to multiple suggests that the filter Ponton accidentally used appears to be from a tool known as Live! Cam Avatar used with old Dell webcam software called Dell Webcam Manager. A Twitter user even Posted that a similar cat astroph happened to them during a Skype interview years ago.
You can see a picture of the cat in this Dell 2007 Product Guide for a computer monitor with an integrated webcam, which is hosted on the Dell website. “The Live! Cam Avatar allows the user to disguise themselves as a movie star, furry friend, or custom animated character during video chat,” says the guide, adding that it uses “intelligent face recognition” to track the user’s head movements. to follow “and lip sync everything that is said immediately.” A 2010 YouTube video gives a good idea of ​​how it works in non-virtual courtrooms.

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

His secretary, he said, is ashamed of the whole cat filter situation. “She wants to hide under a bed,” he said with a chuckle, referring to a classic cat behavior.

Dell webcam software is hard to find these days. But CNN Business was able to see it in action on a Zoom call with Thomas Smith, the CEO of AI photography company Gado Images and a tech journalist (and a cat for short in this case). When Smith learned that the cat filter appeared to be from old Dell webcam software, he searched through a container of gadgets in his home in Lafayette, California and found a Dell laptop from around 2009. He plugged it in and started it up. with the Windows 7 operating system, 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 Debugger tech website, noted that curious filter fans can find the software online and download it to their PC (sorry, Mac users). But it seems the software won’t let you use an avatar like the kitten over your face to stream live via a webcam in the same way that Pontoon accidentally did, Smith said. Instead, you can either record your own video of the kitten filter appearing on your face, or use the filter in a video call by sharing your screen with other viewers (he did this during our conversation).

As for Ponton, he hasn’t been able to find the cat filter on the computer since then. He attempted to search for the webcam software on the old Dell computer during an interview with CNN Business, but the machine had not finished searching by the time the interview ended. If he does track it down, he said, he plans to use it again.

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