DIGITAL MIRROR

Have you ever wondered why you don't look quite the same in photographs as you do in the mirror?

It's a bit annoying isn't it? It's because the mirror has flipped your face around and given you a view of you that only you can see, with everything switched so that left is right, and right is left. When you hold up your right hand to a mirror, the person in the mirror holds up what would be their left.

Oh to be symmetrical! But most of us this side of Hollywood aren't - our faces are subtly and beautifully wonky: teeth, noses, blemishes, eyes, ear-sizes and angles - and it all adds up to a picture that's less familiar in photos, than our personal, bathroom-sink version of us.

I'm mentioning it because I've seen a few things online recently where people don't look quite like  themselves and I've wondered what's been going on.

I think I know though:

It turns out that Zoom, Teams, Face Time, whatever else... have all been showing us the mirror image of ourselves, while displaying the camera image to everybody else. It's built in to the way these algorithms work. Hold up some text or sit in front of a poster with words on and it'll become obvious that you're seeing what you would see in a mirror. But the image of you on your screen is not the image everyone else is seeing.

Also in those devices is the ability to record, and when we video ourselves, the algorithm knows what we're doing and automatically flips the image to the camera image - that's the image everyone else would see if they were facing us. It's an alien way of seeing ourselves - all back to front - but it's also the only way anyone else ever sees us.

Sorry if that's troubling. The truth can be difficult sometimes, but honestly, Zoom has been fooling us.

So there's a temptation then to manually flip back the recording to mirror image isn't there, whenever we play back our videos! It's such  a relief to us to see that familiar old face.

Well. I'd resist that temptation if I were you. As weird as you look to you round the wrong way, the mirror image of you will look just as peculiar to everyone else when they play your video back. Your reflection is a hugely personal thing.

All of that being said, it's given me a little glimpse of something I would invent for the future - a digital mirror. It looks like a regular mirror; you hang it the same way as you would hang a glass one, but it's essentially a camera that's filming you and flipping the image round from mirror to camera image - showing you the you everyone else sees.

Sure, it'll take some getting used to: brushing your teeth will be a nightmare of co-ordination at first, but I reckon as humans we're pretty adaptable. And maybe there'd be a button that lets you flip the image round for that kind of thing anyway.

Will it be a thing? Who knows? Meanwhile, don't be afraid of the camera version of you. That's really how the world sees you, after all.