Following Eyes
Jack-o-Lantern
Carve one, set it on the table, and let it watch.
For iPad and iPhone · iPadOS / iOS 17 or later
It watches the room
Prop your iPad on a table by the candy bowl. The front camera finds the people in front of it, and the pumpkin's eyes follow them — a dart of the eyes, a startled little “ooh,” then a steady gaze that tracks them wherever they go. With nobody there, it drifts and hunts, as though looking for someone.
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Carve your own
Eye size, height and slant. The nose, the mouth, the teeth. How tall or squat the gourd is, how deeply ribbed the shell. The colour of the skin and the colour of the fire inside. Name it, save it, keep a whole patch.
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Five to start from
Ready-carved pumpkins if you would rather not start from nothing. Copy any of them and rework it into something of your own; the originals stay as they are.
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Prod it
Tap its eyes and it blinks. Tap its nose and it flinches. Tap its mouth and it gapes. Flick it sideways and the whole gourd swings round — keep flicking and it goes cross-eyed and dizzy.
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Follow my finger
Want to see the tracking work indoors, with the camera off entirely? Drag anywhere and the eyes follow your fingertip.
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Built for a long evening
Frame rate and detail step down through the quiet stretches and come straight back the moment someone arrives, so an unattended iPad stays cool and does not drain.
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Drawn, not filmed
No video loop, no photographs. The pumpkin is drawn mathematically every frame on the GPU, which is why it stays razor sharp at any size and why the candle genuinely flickers instead of replaying.
Meet the pumpkins
All five are rendered by the app itself — these are not drawings.
Classic 
Tall 
Grinner 
Snaggletooth 
Brute
Everything in one place
Pick a pumpkin, carve a new one, run the display, or try it with your finger. Settings for the gaze, the mood and the battery are a couple of taps away — and while the pumpkin is on screen, a two-finger double-tap opens them without disturbing the show.
Privacy
This is a camera pointed at other people's children. It is worth being exact.
- The camera is used for one thing: working out where people are standing, so the eyes know where to look. That happens entirely on your device.
- Frames are examined in memory and discarded immediately. No image is ever saved, and no image is ever shown to you.
- No face is identified, matched or remembered. The app detects that a person-shaped region is present and roughly where — never who.
- The app contains no networking code at all. It works perfectly in airplane mode, because it has nothing to connect to.
- No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no third-party code.
- The only things written to your device are the pumpkins you carve and your own settings. One button in the app erases both.
Details
- Requires
- iPadOS or iOS 17 or later
- Devices
- iPad and iPhone, portrait or landscape
- Best with
- An iPad on a table, plugged in
- Audio
- None, by design — it is meant to sit in a room with people talking
- Price
- No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no advertising
- Support
- questions@dronefone.com
One honest caveat: person detection needs some light. The pumpkin's own glow helps more than you would expect, but a pitch-dark porch is hard.