Camera effects
SUPER SHIFT W opens your webcam in the island, with effects that every call sees. The shell feeds a virtual camera named impasto camera: pick it as the camera in Discord, a browser or any other program, and what it shows is the picture the panel shows, effects and all.
The panel
Section titled “The panel”- The preview, drawn as a mirror: the picture a call gets, read back from the virtual camera.
- A strip of effects under it, moved with the wheel, a sideways swipe or a drag, and picked with a click.
- Reactions, a tile per gesture, lit in the accent when it is on.
- The status line along the bottom: the Virtual camera switch, and what is reading it right now. Off, no program can use it.
- The shutter saves the picture, mirrored as the preview shows it, into
your camera folder (or
Cameraunder your pictures), and copies it.
The webcam is on only while something reads the virtual camera, a call or the panel itself, and the effects run only then: at rest it reads nothing and uses no processor. While a call reads it, it takes about one core. The privacy mark beside the time names the program reading the virtual camera.
Effects
Section titled “Effects”| Effect | What it does |
|---|---|
| Natural | The webcam as it is |
| Palette | The picture tinted in the palette’s accent |
| Mono | Black and white |
| Warm | A warmer picture, toward the palette’s yellow |
| Blur back | Everything behind you blurred |
| Centre Stage | Closes in on your face and follows it as you move |
| Shades | Sunglasses on your face |
| Crown | A crown on your head |
| Sparkle | Sparkles circling your head, passing behind it |
Shades, the crown and the sparkles are built in 3D on the angle of your head, so they turn with it and hide behind it.
Reactions
Section titled “Reactions”A gesture sends its own emoji up from the hand that made it. Each one is switched on its tile:
| Gesture | |
|---|---|
| Thumbs up 👍 | On |
| Thumbs down 👎 | On |
| Heart 🫶 | On |
| Peace ✌️ | On |
| Horns 🤘 | On |
| OK 👌 | On |
| Middle finger 🖕 | Off until you switch it on |
The effect and the reactions belong to the machine, so they stay the same across profiles.
Setting it up
Section titled “Setting it up”./setup camera installs the virtual camera, and ./setup install runs
it once on a machine with a webcam, unless --skip-extras. It installs
v4l2loopback with your kernel’s headers, OpenCV and MediaPipe (from the AUR),
has the module load at every boot as impasto camera, and downloads the
face, hand and background models from Google’s storage into
~/.local/share/impasto/camera. A machine without a webcam is skipped.
What the effects do not do is listed under Limitations.