Backdrop 0.6.0

What's new: a Studio window, Present, and Dragon Ball

Present. Share a window or your whole screen and arrange it with your hands. Pick what to share in the new Present pane, then choose how it appears: a Floating Panel over your backdrop, or a Presenter view with you cut out in front of your screen or as a small camera bubble beside it. Turn on hand control and the picture works like a trackpad the size of the frame: pinch to grab the panel, move your hand to drag it, use both hands to resize it, let go and it glides to a stop and snaps into place, double-pinch to fill the frame. Layout presets: Left, Right, Centre, Corner Bubble and Side by Side. The grab handles, the how-to hand and the status cards are drawn only on your own preview, never in the picture that goes out to your call. A red dot joins the menu bar icon while your screen is going out, and ⌃⌥P pauses it. You can pick a specific display or window, show or hide the pointer, and capture at 30 or 60 frames a second.

Dragon Ball. One lens under Faces › Anime that uses your face, your hands and your outline together. Hold both fists up and still to power up through nine forms, from Dragon Ball Z (Super Saiyan, 2, 3) to Dragon Ball Super (God, Blue, Blue Kaioken, Ultra Ego, Ultra Instinct Sign, Ultra Instinct), each with its own hair, eyes, brows and aura. Then fire moves from the show with your hands, sized and coloured by the form you are in: Kamehameha, Final Flash, Special Beam Cannon, Instant Transmission, Ki Blast, Finger Beam, Spirit Bomb, Destructo Disc, Solar Flare and Zanzoken. Every move is a pose held for a moment, so waving at your friends does not set one off. Hold both open palms low and apart to power back down.

The Studio. A full window next to the menu bar popover, with panes for Backgrounds, Present, Lenses, Automation, Camera and Settings (⌘1 to ⌘6, and ⌘, for Settings anywhere). The camera switch and what is on the picture stay in the sidebar.

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. Sharing a window or screen asks for Screen Recording permission the first time.

Verify

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

shasum -a 256 -c Backdrop-0.6.0.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:

• Present was checked on drawn frames, test hands and screenshots, not in a real call. Live capture of real windows, the picker's live thumbnails and dragging the panel with a real hand in front of the camera have not been tried end to end. The pinch timing, the grab and resize feel and the snapping are the first things to tune on real hands. The picker's thumbnails refresh one after another every few seconds, and the camera bubble is framed on the middle of your cutout, not on your face.
• Dragon Ball's hand poses were measured on made-up hands and on Vision's reading of emoji hands. How Vision reads a real cupped hand for the Kamehameha, and how much a real palm's size jitters, are the first things to tune. A palm pushed at the camera while saying "stop" can fire a Ki Blast. Moves are measured from your face, so none fires with no face in view. Blue and Blue Kaioken have nearly the same hair, and Super Saiyan and Super Saiyan 2 differ mostly in their aura.
• Dragon Ball is heavier than most lenses. The top form in the middle of a move took about 20 ms a frame on a busy Mac in the tests, so check it in a real call before relying on it at 30 frames a second.
• Hand tracking now idles at 8 looks a second after two seconds with no hand in view, to save power, and goes back to 30 as soon as one appears. This also applies to the hand lenses, so the first moment of a gesture after a long pause can lag slightly.
• Hand and face thresholds in the older lenses are still tuned on drawn faces and hands, and speed was measured on one busy Mac.