“With the Live! Cam Avatar, user is able to disguise as a movie star, furry friend or any customized animated character during video chatting,” the guide boasts, adding it uses “intelligent face tracking” to follow the user’s head movements “and lip sync anything that is being said instantly.” A YouTube video from 2010 gives a good sense for how it works in non-virtual-courtroom settings. You can see a picture of the cat in this 2007 Dell product guide for a computer monitor with an integrated webcam, which is hosted on Dell’s site. One Twitter user even posted that a similar cat-astrophe happened to them during a job interview via Skype years ago. It turns out to be much older technology: Some internet sleuthing 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 old Dell webcam software called Dell Webcam Manager. That time, he said, “seemed like an eternity.”Īs for the cat filter, it’s not one that’s built into Zoom, and it isn’t one you can find by searching Snap Camera, which is an application commonly used with Zoom that can add filters (Snap calls them “lenses”) around or atop your face during a video chat. This lasted for about 42 seconds until it was somehow turned off. “Somehow, when I got called into court, I miraculously transformed into a cat,” he said. He said he had no idea how the cat filter ended up superimposed on his face, and that while waiting for the meeting to start, his face looked normal, as he could see it on his own computer monitor.

Reached Wednesday by phone, Ponton - who told CNN Business he did not currently look like a cat - was able to provide some more details about what happened. Beyond the fits of laughter it invariably provoked in viewers, it presented some questions that even Ponton couldn’t answer: How did it happen? And where can other people get that adorable cat filter? The exchange, which lasted less than a minute until the filter was turned off and Ponton regained his human form, ricocheted across the internet on Tuesday after it was posted to the court’s YouTube channel.

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