Your Chromebook’s camera might soon let you add funny filters and animations to your photos.

Force enable face AE

Before we start, here is a disclaimer. This, to be honest, is an educated guess at best.

The story starts with this little experimental flag that I spotted in the Chromium OS souce code today.

Force enable face AE: Enable this flag to force enable face AE for camera

The best explanation I have for “AE” is “After Effects”.

If that is true, what we are looking at is a Chrome OS camera feature that will let you add effects to your face while taking a picture or even better, while recording videos.

I am leaning more towards the video part. All the major video conference platforms, Zoom, Teams, and the like offer face effects.

Summary

There were a few more code change requests tagged “VCD“. However, I could not find anything useful from them. The feature request bug for this change is set to private.

So, as you can see, I am hanging tight to the “face” and “AE” part and trying to guess that this is a face filter/animation feature for videos from the Chrome OS camera. I would love to hear what you think about this flag.

Any other guesses? Let me know in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.