Any video conferencing app can use the iPad Pro’s sleek zoom and pan camera

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Apple has confirmed that the digital pan and zoom feature of the front camera of the new M1 iPad Pro can work with any video conferencing app, not just FaceTime. That opens the door for popular apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to allow remote working and e-learning to merge seamlessly into the realities of pandemic life – a hybrid lifestyle that is likely to continue even after the outbreak subsides.

Center Stage, as Apple calls it, ensures that video conference attendees stay in view, even as they move across a room, by combining machine learning with a fixed 12-megapixel sensor that provides an ultra-wide 122-degree field of view. We’ve seen similar tracking on the Portal TV, Echo Show 10, and even the Xbox Kinect accessory. But those are niche devices compared to the iPad, which saw sales soar last year when students and remote workers stockpiled the tablets en masse.

“Center Stage works with FaceTime and other video conferencing apps,” Apple said on the iPad Pro landing page. Apple has missed its chance to scale FaceTime to compete with Zoom and Teams by abandoning its promise to make it an industry standard in favor of ecosytem lock-in.

The ultra-wide front camera is still at the “top” of the new iPad Pro.
Image: Apple

Apple demonstrated Center Stage with two participants, both properly recognized and framed as they move around a kitchen, during a FaceTime call with a third. It’s a good demo; the COVID-19 pandemic has mixed work and life so difficult that it is now quite common to see people eating at a Zoom meeting in international time zones, or a child asking for help from a parent during a Teams school lesson. Tech like Center Stage can help advance this sense of humanity in our otherwise stoic professional and educational pursuits.

Unfortunately, the position of the front camera, even on the new M1 iPad Pro, makes participants appear to stare to the side when used with a keyboard dock, as is common for business and school use. And iPadOS causes other frustrations with video conferencing. Hopefully the iPad Pro is just the beginning, and we’ll soon see ultra-wide Center Stage cameras come to the much-maligned but better-positioned MacBook webcams.

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