The whole “make your face look like a Pixar/Dreamworks animated character” has been quite popular lately. Who hasn’t had at least one sibling or college friend send them images of themselves looking like they stepped out of Inside Out? We’ve seen it on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Well, now you can take that idea and actually animate it on your desktop, and not just on your mobile device. You can mildly freak out all of your colleagues by animating yourself in a Zoom call with the Snap Camera app.
Via Polygon, we’ve learned how you can now do this using Snapchat’s desktop app. The filter turns users into a standard animated version of themselves, with varying degrees of accuracy. One thing we’ll say, the movements for this one are pretty fluid. Obviously, the technology is somewhat limited still, so don’t expect it to capture your full range of expression. But it more than gets the job done. You can watch an example in the video above, from YouTuber VideoZeus.
All you have to do is download and install the Snap Camera app. Once you’ve done that, start the app, then start Zoom, and then make Snap Camera your camera input. If you are doing this on a Mac, click “Preferences” > “Video” in the top menu. If you’re a PC person, then be sure to click the gear icon in the upper-right of the app then select the one that says “Video.” From there, go to the drop-down menu which says “Camera,” and then you select “Snap Camera” instead of your current input.
VideoZeus
After that, go to the Snap Camera app and choose the filter you want from the carousel underneath the camera feed. And just like that, you’ll look like one of the humans in the Toy Story movies. The novelty of this is probably fun but will wear off pretty quickly. So we say do it now, before looking just like Linguini from Ratatouille loses its charm.