Funnier filter future 🎊
Chatting to friends, family and colleagues on video is becoming an everyday activity for many. The advantage of interacting with others on video is the more personal connection you get when adding imagery to only audio calls. on top of that, several social media channels, such as Snapchat already let the user enhance the video with filters, effects and adjustments. The new Zombocam extension let’s you do the same thing to your appear.in video conversation and have even more fun when video chatting!
Adding filters lowers the shoulders and even lets us joke around a bit, taking the edge off a sometimes serious format. Also (let’s be honest) a beautification filter such as “Nashville” can turn an early morning Monday meeting to less of a pain! Børge Dvergsdal, our Customer Relationship Manager, loves that he “can look good even on a bad day”.
Zombocam — filters and effects for your webcam
With Zombocam, you can now add live effects to your webcam, and share your effect combinations with your friends as emojis. For instance you can add a swirl to your Facebook photos, or add the Nashville filter to your appear.in conversation! 😄
Websites like ours, ask to get access to your webcam when you start a video conversation. What Zombocam does, is that it adds filters and effects to the webcam video inside the browser, so that when you have it installed, the website will get access to the enhanced version of the webcam instead of the normal one. In fact, since it’s all happening inside the browser, Zombocam works on any website that asks to use your webcam! Pretty cool!
On the more technical side, Zombocam transparently intercepts getUserMedia calls and adds a canvas/WebGL-based preprocessing step. With canvas, they are able to change the colors and position of the pixels in your video, or even replace them with a separate gif.
We are in love with Zombocam, and asked the developers behind it why they use filters themselves:
“I like that it hides the many imperfections of my hideous outer shell, lol :D”
“I like that you can send relevant gifs when something funny happens!”
“Even appear.in meetings can get passive at times, so it’s fun to play with image effects while you’re doing something else”
“It’s fun having a slight effect where somebody suddenly goes like ‘wait a minute, why do the colors look differently?”
“i love distortion filters since I think I look kinda funny and want to emphasize that (no joke)”
Now let’s have some fun!
Written by Meri Sorgaard, Marketing Manager appear.in
