Apple’s drag-and-drop-the-dog Visual Look Up tool is the coolest iOS 16 feature you never knew Android needed
Appleborrowed a few tricksfrom Android in iOS 16, including Maps, the lock screen, and even photos. Apple did surpass Google in one weird, kind of wonderful way. In iOS 16, iPhone folks will be able todrag-and-drop subjectsfrom a photo into other apps. It’s pretty neat.
Apple says this is part of the newly upgraded Visual Look Up feature, which leverages on-device machine learning to perform a huge number of calculations per second—the actual number doesn’t matter if it works as well as it does in the demo above. You just long-press, and the iPhone can identify the subject of the photo and remove it from the background. I’ve done this on occasion in Photoshop, and it’s very time-consuming. So, it’s impressive that the iPhone can do it instantly in a single step.
With the subject now freed of the photo, you can paste it into apps like Messages. It’s basically a sticker, created on the spot from your photo. Based on the AI magic Google has shown off over the years, I have no doubt the company could build a version of this feature in Google Photos. It can already do some similar kinds of visual processing with Magic Eraser. Apple’s iOS 16 will launch later this year. Get on it, Google.
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