How to Enable Center Stage on Your IPad
Sitting right in front of your iPad screen can tire you out when you spend hours on video calling. But if you want to get around (say, you want to show or cook something), it’s almost impossible if you don’t have someone to follow you.
The Center Stage feature on iPad takes care of that. When this feature is enabled, the iPad camera will automatically pan and zoom to follow you.
How does Center Stage work on iPad?
Apple uses some clever machine learning tricks to automatically zoom and pan the camera. All supported iPads have a wide-angle camera lens, and by default the iPad only shows the cropped view (the one in focus on your face).
But as you move, the camera image will also pan and zoom to focus on you. If someone else comes into view, the camera will zoom out (to the actual wide angle image) to cover more people. All of this happens automatically, so you have nothing to worry about.
How to enable Center Stage on iPad
Center Stage is built into the FaceTime app, but it also works in third-party apps that support this feature. Apps like Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Filmic Pro have Center Stage built in.
Center Stage is turned on by default in FaceTime, but if it isn’t, you can turn it on in the Settings app. Go to the FaceTime section and turn on the Center Stage feature.
Then, while you’re on a FaceTime conversation, open the options menu. From there, you can enable or disable the “ Center Stage ” feature for the call.
It’s the same with third party apps. Open the Settings app and find the app you want (this could be Zoom or Google Meet). Then turn on “ Center Stage. You will find a new “Center Scene” button in the app’s video calling interface, and from there you can enable or disable the “Center Scene” feature for the call.
Which iPads support Center Stage?
Although Center Stage is a software feature, it uses new high-quality wide-angle cameras that are only available on select iPad and iPad Pro models. Here is a list of iPads compatible with Center Stage:
- 5th Generation iPad Pro 12.9-inch (Released 2021)
- IPad Pro 11th Generation 3rd Generation (Released 2021)
- 9th generation iPad, 10.2 inches (released in 2021)
- 6th generation iPad mini 8.3-inch (released in 2021)
As of 2021, four of the last five iPads have Center Stage. The only iPad not on the list is the 2020 iPad Air.