Camo, a Great App That Uses Your iPhone as a Mac Webcam, Adds Snap AR Features
During the pandemic, video calls have become an everyday way for many of us to communicate with coworkers and even friends and family. But Macs, especially older models, aren’t exactly known for top-notch built-in webcams.
Camo helps with that problem, using a high-quality camera you probably have in your pocket—an iPhone. With the app, you can use your iPhone as a Mac webcam with any popular video calling service like Zoom. Meet, Teams, Skype, Slack, and many others. There’s no need to run any special commands.
With the system, you can run video in up to high-resolution 1080p video. You can even use hardware and software controls to tune your image. You can use both a front or rear camera. The app is also available to use on any iPad as well.
And with a new update, Camo is integrating with the Snap API to bring AR capabilities to your video call.
All users can access the AR features. There are more than 12 lenses across the following categories according to the company:
Focus: Lenses that help users focus on the speaker in streams, with aesthetic techniques such as “Portrait Mode” and background muting.
Accessibility: Lenses that help streamers and presenters convey visual cues for emotion and reaction more clearly, with face-tracking and use of emoji for face and hand signals.
Masking: Lenses to render the user with varying degrees of fidelity, such as with a light beauty filter, reduced colour-set, or even in sketch form. These lenses may help reduce presenter overwhelm on streams, combating the effects of “Zoom fatigue.”
Novelty: A collection of more entertaining lenses from the Snap Lens Creator community, which range from adding a photorealistic cat to the streamer’s scene through chromatic lighting effects to making them largely invisible.
All of the AR work happens on your iPhone or iPad so it won’t slow your Mac down during a call.
The Camo app is a free download on the App Store and is for the iPhone or iPad. You’ll also need to Mac version of the app, which is free through developer Reincubate’s site here.
While the app is free to use, you can also subscribe to Camo Pro for $4.99 per month or $39.99 annually. Subscribers will be able to access all of the app’s features and remove the watermark. It can be used on up to two computers.
