Viral ‘I’m Not a Cat’ Filter Is Decades-Old Software

Footage of a Texan lawyer denying he was a cat as he appeared with a feline filter on a live call was created using a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops. The BBC reports: The Live Cam Avatar software was also available for people to download. It is not clear how the lawyer found himself speaking through the face of a worried-looking cat. But it seems even in its heyday, there was a history of people becoming trapped as the avatar and finding it hard to remove. One, ChemBark, describes in a blog how he appeared “as a sad kitten” during a job interview via Skype. “I started frantically scrolling down all of the menus in Skype, trying to remedy the situation,” he writes. Tweeting now the filter is back in the news, he says it “was the default setting on Dell’s webcam software.” Another blog, written in 2010, offers a detailed explanation of how to remove “the stupid white cat.” The company behind the filter, Reallusion, described it as a “customizable emotive facial animation that gives you much more fun that the conventional video chatting.” Reallusion now provides sophisticated real-time 3D animation software — but the cat filter seems no longer to be available in its online shop.