A woman with an iPhone proclaims that it can unlock the secrets to the sometimes mysterious symbols your car will deliver to you in the form of a dashboard warning light.
“Did you know on your iPhone, that you could take a picture, say, for instance, with symbols on your car dash light?” she says. “If a light comes on and it will tell you exactly what it is? I’m going to show you.”
That’s the promise that creator Dnay (@dnay1.0) makes in a video she posted last Monday, getting more than 928,000 views and 51,000 likes since putting it up. She unlocks a few different functionalities of what Apple officially refers to as Visual Look Up.
What is iPhone’s Visual Look Up?
“With Visual Look Up, you can identify and learn about popular landmarks, plants, pets, and more that appear in your photos and videos in the Photos app,” the site notes. “Visual Look Up can also identify food in a photo and suggest related recipes.”
Dnay starts with a photo of a car dashboard and an array of warning lights. Car and Driver identifies some of the more common ones in an article on the topic, including the battery warning light, which the author notes is “easy to decipher because it looks exactly like the thing that needs attention;” the coolant temperature light, which is the one “looking like a thermometer taking a dip in the ocean” letting you know if your car is running too hot; and the dreaded check engine light, which the article helpfully explains is “the most ambiguous because it relates to anything having to do with the car’s motor and emissions system.”
How to use Visual Look Up
“Just go ahead and take a picture of it,” Dnay instructs viewers. “Then, whenever you go to your gallery, click on that symbol down … there’s usually an eye with a little asterisk beside it.”
Then, depending on how many warning lights it registers, it will produce “a list of all the symbols that are recognized in that picture. And once you click on one of them, then it will describe what each one of the symbols means.”
Dnay notes that you can also do this with plants, and you can use it to identify whatever plant you might happen upon, whether it’s poison ivy or something more innocuous. You can also use it to identify animals, though in the example Dnay gives, the iPhone rules the animal in question to either be a cat or a fennec fox.
@dnay1.0 Iphone picture hack #toxictipsforgirls #socialmediahacks #techtipsandtricks #phonetipsandtricks #iphonetipsandtricks #iphone101 #iphonephotographytricks #iphoneforbeginners #iphonehelp #socialmediatips #ios #appleiphones #apple ♬ original sound – dnay
Commenters appreciated the new knowledge.
Someone cracked, “I don’t need a man now.”
Another observed, “I had no idea!! This is amazing!!
One person, however, did say it might need some work. “I did it with this dog and it told me that my frenchie was a Boston terrier,” they wrote.
The Daily Dot has reached out to both Dnay and Apple via email.
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