Backdrop 0.7.1

What's new: lenses stay on you in Present

Fixed: lenses were drawn in the wrong place while you were presenting. When Present moved, shrank or tucked you into a bubble, a lens on top (a crown, Dragon Ball's hair and aura, anything that follows your face) was still placed where the camera had you, so it landed beside your head instead of on it. Dragon Ball also read your fists where you now are but your face where you were.

Lenses are now told where your face, hands and outline are in the picture everyone sees, so they stay on you in every Present arrangement: the Floating Panel with you off to one side, Presenter with your cutout moved or resized, and the camera bubble. This applies to every lens that reads your face, hands or outline, not only Dragon Ball.

In a bubble, a lens now works inside the bubble. What it draws follows you there, it stops at the bubble's edge, and the bubble's own room and ring are kept when a lens puts you back over the picture (before, a lens in a bubble drew as if you were still full size).

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; a second camera does not need it.

Verify

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

shasum -a 256 -c Backdrop-0.7.1.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:

• The lens fix was tested on drawn faces, not real ones. The checks run a made-up face through the real pipeline and confirm that where a lens is told your eyes are is where they are painted, in six Present layouts, and the crown and Dragon Ball were rendered and looked at. It has not been tried on a real face or in a live call, so how a crown or hair sits on a real head is still the thing to look at.
• The second camera was built and tested without a second camera. The capture is the same code as the main camera's and the rest is covered by tests and pictures, but plugging one in, pulling it out in the middle of a call, an iPhone as a Continuity Camera and two cameras on one USB hub have not been tried with real hardware. Only one second camera can be shown at a time, and it cannot be shown together with a shared screen. It is shown as it arrives (a phone held upright gives a tall picture; there is no rotate or mirror option) and is limited to 720p.
• Present's hand control and Dragon Ball's poses were tuned without real hands, on made-up hands and Vision's reading of emoji hands, so how easily a pinch grabs and how a real cupped hand reads are the first things to tune.
• Dragon Ball is heavier than most lenses: its 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 and face thresholds in the older lenses are still tuned on drawn faces and hands, and speed was measured on one busy Mac.