Depending on how “online” you are, you may have seen an image floating around social media with a strange quirk: a woman, comedian Tessa Coates, is standing in front of two mirrors in a wedding dress and somehow manner, holding three poses at once. Coates insisted in his Instagram post that the image was not altered; It just came out that way.
So what happened? Was it a buggy iOS Live Photo (the iOS feature that takes short videos and selects the best one)? A fake image manipulated with Photoshop? A brief look at three different and parallel realities?
No, it's simpler than all that. Faruk from iPhonedo YouTube channel posted a short video to Threads explaining exactly what happened, and it's much simpler than you might expect.
They are several images, stitched together using the “panoramic” function of Coates' iPhone 12. Faruk discovered this by looking at the shot's metadata and seeing that its resolution is cropped from the main camera's normal resolution to 3028 x 3948, which happens when taking a photo in widescreen mode.
The reason has to do with how panoramic shots work on the iPhone. When you take a photo in “panoramic” mode, the camera takes many photos and stitches them together into a single, larger photo. To prevent the final image from moving, the phone must crop them before stitching them together, moving up, down and across the original images to match them at the edges. The same principle applies to digital video stabilization, producing smooth videos from previously shaky images.
But the seams aren't perfect, as anyone who's taken their share of panoramic photos with the iPhone can attest, often resulting in wacky artifacts like missing arms and distorted faces. In Coates' case, her phone camera took several photos, and because she couldn't know that the women in the mirrors were also Coates, she didn't make sure to synchronize the poses. Faruk even manages to reproduce the phenomenon in his video. But it's a shame. He was hoping that we were really seeing evidence of the multiverse.
