Did Qualcomm just kill the ring light? Future Android phones could let you add a virtual, moveable light source to video calls
Picture the scene: you jump on an important work call, fresh-faced and ready to confidently deliver your trademark “nothing from me” line, only to discover that the light (or lack thereof) in your work-from-home office has left you looking less like a serious businessperson and more like a seedy Omegle user from 2010. Don’t worry – we’ve all been there.
Thankfully, Qualcomm knows we’ve all been there, which is why the American semiconductor giant has seen fit to equip its newly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset with an AI-powered, real-time lighting tool that could banish terrible video call lighting to the annals of internet history.
AI Portrait Video Re-lighting lets you add a virtual, moveable light source that maps to the contours of your face to better illuminate it in heavily backlit environments. This lighting can be adjusted manually, or you can let your phone’s AI do the work for you, and the entire process takes place on-device, with no added latency. Wait a minute, did Qualcomm just kill the ring light?
Qualcomm debuted the new tool at Snapdragon Summit 2024, demonstrating its potential in a nameless dummy phone, though we could conceivably see AI Portrait Video Re-lighting feature (albeit with a different name) in some of the best Android phones of 2025 – think the much rumored Samsung Galaxy S25, OnePlus 13, Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and so on.
That’s because all of those upcoming flagship phones are expected to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, meaning their respective OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) will have the option of implementing this new AI technology as they see fit.
Indeed, as Qualcomm’s Senior Director of Product Management, Judd Heape, confirmed to TechRadar in a roundtable interview at Snapdragon Summit (with reference to Limitless Segmentation, another Snapdragon 8 Elite-specific camera feature): “Limitless Segmentation is embedded into the [Snapdragon 8 Elite] camera framework – it’s shipping with the baseline camera. So, it will be up to OEMs as to how they integrate it [and other AI features] into the main products.”
Limitless Segmentation segments an image into over 250 layers, optimizing and enhancing each layer (including faces, hair, clothing, objects, and backgrounds) in the process, so presumably Qualcomm’s AI Portrait Video Re-lighting technology could be applied to still portraits, too. Might we see a “Portraits by Qualcomm” label added to images taken with the best Samsung phones in the near future? It’s certainly a possibility.
In any case, we’re glad to see Qualcomm using the power of its Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset to develop practical generative AI tools like this one. Sure, bespoke emoji creators are great – but they’re not going to help you save face when your video call lighting just ain’t it.
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Picture the scene: you jump on an important work call, fresh-faced and ready to confidently deliver your trademark “nothing from me” line, only to discover that the light (or lack thereof) in your work-from-home office has left you looking less like a serious businessperson and more like a seedy Omegle…
