Drawing with Shape Detection

In this video, we’re going to look at shape detection on the iPhone. Apple added a new feature with iOS 14, to where when you draw on your iPhone, you can have the iPhone detect what shape you’re trying to draw. Let’s take a look at shape detection on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

Now shape detection works across multiple apps. It will work in the Notes app. It’ll work when you take a screenshot. Let’s first take a look at how it works in Notes. It basically works the same way, but we’re going to look at it in Notes, and then we’re going to take a screenshot and see how it works.

I’m going to swipe over to the left, and now let’s open up my Notes app. I’m going to create a new note. Now, what I want to do is I want to draw on here. I want to sketch. To do that, we tap on the sketch tool here. Now, what I’m able to do is draw on my iPhone. So let’s draw a simple star. I just tap in here and draw, and I have my star. But now with shape detection, the iPhone will look at that and actually create a better star for me. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to undo this. And now I draw the same star, but instead of just lifting my finger up at the end, what I need to do is I just need to pause it there. When I pause it when I’m done drawing, the iPhone will then detect what shape I’m trying to draw; in my case, it’s going to be a star, and make a better star. So I draw my star again, and I pause, and now we can see we have a nice star. Let’s go and dry circle. I tap on this to undo, and if I just draw a circle and let go, we can see we have my crude circle. But now, if I draw a circle and pause, we have a better circle.

Let’s see how this works in screenshots. I’m going to swipe up and now let’s go and take a screenshot. I press in on the sleep/wake button, and then I also press in on the volume up button. We have my screenshot here. Let’s say I wanted to circle around this photo here. I go and select my tool. I’m just going to use this yellow marker here. Let’s go and change the color. Let’s go with a nice bright blue. Now I close this, and now all I need to do is just draw around it. I can draw, and we can see we have my nice crude circle there. Let’s go and undo this. And now I draw again, but this time I’m going to pause at the end. I draw and pause. And now we can see, we have a nice circle there.

So that’s how we can now have the iPhone detect what shape we’re trying to draw. All we have to do is just draw our shape. And then, instead of lifting up our finger right away, we just pause for a second or two, that tells the iPhone to detect what shape you are drawing, and then it’ll draw the shape for you.

So that’s how shape detection works on the iPhone.