Backdrop 0.5.0

What's new: hands, living scenes, and a lot more to play with

Hand tracking. Backdrop can now see your hands (up to two, using Vision's hand pose, and only while a lens that uses them is on). Slice fruit with your hand like a sword, shoot targets with a finger gun, play air hockey with both hands, cast fireballs, paint in the air, or hold a light blade. Fifteen filters and eleven games are played with your hands. Lenses that need a hand say so in the picker.

Scenes. A new kind of lens: a living backdrop with hand-drawn animals in it. In the Safari a lion roars, an elephant sprays water and vultures circle; in the Jungle a monkey climbs onto your head and a parrot lands on your raised palm. The animals notice you, come after you, interact, and run off if you wave. Ten scenes: Safari, Jungle, Deep Sea, Dino Park, Haunted Manor, Arctic, Outer Space, Dragon Castle, Enchanted Forest and Pirate Cove.

A lot more content, redone with more care.

• 60 filters: film and photographic looks (Film Noir, Super 8, Instant Photo, Watercolour, Blueprint...), weather and light (rain, fireworks, northern lights, campfire...), and hand filters.
• 62 face lenses: costumes that fit your head (animals, wizard, pirate, astronaut, robot...), lenses that react to your expression (hearts, tears, storm cloud, anime eyes, face scanner...) and smoother funhouse warps.
• 32 games played with your hands, face or whole body, all with one consistent set of screens kept low in the frame so nothing covers your face.
• 68 built-in backgrounds drawn in code: studio rooms, places, live scenes, mesh gradients and lit studio walls.
• 30 sample lens packs to open and copy. New ones are added to your Lenses folder when you update; ones you deleted stay deleted.

A new lens picker. Every lens now has a real preview, with search, sub-groups, Favourites and Recent, in both the menu bar and the Studio.

Install

1. Unzip it and drag Backdrop.app into Applications. It has to live there for macOS to accept its camera extension.
2. Open it. Click the menu bar icon, then Set Up Backdrop Camera, and approve it in System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions › Camera Extensions.
3. Turn the camera on, then choose Backdrop Camera in your video app.

Upgrading: replace the app in Applications and open it. It updates its own camera extension when it starts. If another app (Discord, a browser, FaceTime) is using the camera at that moment, macOS can leave Backdrop Camera missing from the list afterwards. Quit those apps and restart Backdrop; if it is still missing, restart your Mac.

Requires macOS 15.1 or later on Apple silicon. AI backgrounds need Apple Intelligence.

Verify

Signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized by Apple. To check the download:

shasum -a 256 -c Backdrop-0.5.0.zip.sha256

Early release

Developed and tested on a single Apple silicon Mac running macOS 27. The engine has automated tests, but the virtual camera, hand tracking and the lenses have had limited real-world testing, so expect rough edges. In particular:

• Hand tracking was tuned without real hands. The gesture rules were built on made-up hands and on Vision's reading of emoji hands. The finger-gun trigger, the poke speed in Whack-a-Mole, the gesture vote in Rock Paper Scissors and similar details are the first things to tune on real hands. A finger pointed straight at the camera looks like a curled finger to a 2D tracker, and a very fast swipe can blur a hand out of tracking for a moment.
• Face lenses were tuned on drawn faces. Costumes now fit a longer head, but where things sit and how far you have to open your mouth, raise your eyebrows or smile may still need tuning. The "Kisses" lens guesses at real lip proportions.
• Speed was measured on one busy Mac. Each lens is built to cost a few milliseconds a frame, and a sample from every category held 30 fps in tests, but your numbers may differ.
• The new lens picker was checked offscreen, not in the running app.