Trial Judge Rittenhouse is still baffled by the pinch to zoom in

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Prosecution and defense continue to argue over evidence in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people during a protest in Wisconsin, with a surprising amount of confusion from both defense and Judge Bruce Schroeder over what happens when you pinch to zoom. a touchscreen device.

On Wednesday, Schroeder said it was up to the prosecution to prove that zooming in on a video with an iPad does not alter or manipulate the footage. “The iPads, manufactured by Apple, contain artificial intelligence that allows you to view things through three dimensions and logarithms,” the defense said as part of its objection, adding that the iPad “uses artificial intelligence, or their logarithms, to create what they believe is happening. So this isn’t actually an enhanced video; this is Apple’s iPad programming that creates what it thinks is there, not what is necessarily there.

Judge Schroeder dropped the objection after giving prosecutors just 20 minutes to find an expert to explain how pinch-to-zoom worked on an iPad. (It should be noted, of course, that iPads don’t have “logarithms” that allow you to view video in three dimensions or “recreate” parts of an image that aren’t there.)

During discussions on the jury’s instructions broadcast live today, the judge went further, pulling out his smartphone to demonstrate his continued bewilderment at pinch-to-zoom.

Specifically, the judge saves his friends’ texts by taking screenshots and emailing them to himself. Today he showed one of these screenshots to the courtroom, noting that “some of them are quite long” and “they show up in my email like this, like a little tape”, so he zooms them in and “it’s just a blur “.

According to the judge (speaking to the prosecution), “You were talking the other day… it’s just like a cellphone where you can expand an image and enlarge it. But it’s not making it bigger; it’s just a blur. Well, it’s not making it bigger … it’s making it bigger, but it’s nothing more than a blur. “He then asked,” how can it be reliable … why is it not reliable for me and for receiving my messages. on the phone”.

The prosecutor replied: “I think you are taking the wrong photo on your phone. I’m not tech support, but… ”The judge replied,“ I’m not surprised, ”causing a laugh.

We explain what’s going on here. Judge Schroeder appears to be using a Samsung Galaxy 20. This means that he is probably activating “scroll capture”, a Samsung screenshot feature that produces long images of an entire window, in this case the entire text conversation. Then those screenshots are displayed as long thin images on its screen to fit. When he emails (or text messages) that image to himself, the image is then compressed to a smaller resolution and file size, so when he tries to enlarge it, it’s blurry.

It appears that Judge Schroeder is activating scroll capture on his Galaxy S20

None of this is useful evidence in support of the defense’s objection to the iPad’s pinch-to-zoom. First, a Galaxy S20 runs Google’s Android operating system with various Samsung customizations, while the defense-specific objections concerned Apple’s “logarithms” on an iPad. So from the start, whatever a Samsung phone is doing is not relevant to an objection about how an Apple device works. Second, the defense’s objection concerns those Apple logarithms that add data to an image so that it can be viewed in three dimensions or recreate what isn’t there. Here, Judge Shroeder’s phone clearly doesn’t add any data to the image – it stays blurry. If anything, his experience supports the prosecution’s ability to zoom in on a video. But still: different software from different companies.

The judge ended the conversation by failing to silence his phone.

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