With Clear Camera, you can turn your iPhone or iPad into a powerful camera for your live streams.
Clear camera is the fourth project of my 12 startup challenge.
Story behind this project
During this quarantine, I noticed that a lot of people are discovering Twitch and among them some wanted to start streaming. That’s also true for me, this month I’ve wanted to start over DJaying and sometime launch a quick music live stream. In order to get a decent stream, you need a camera. I have my Macbook’s webcam that is not good at all. I have a great DSLR but I don’t have a video capture card. My last option is my iPhone, the camera is pretty good with the right light condition and the setup easy.
On mac you can easily capture the iPhone screen using Quicktime Player or OBS, from there you only need to put your iphone on a tripod and launch the camera. Since the entire screen of the phone is recorded you have all the UI displayed on your camera, the shutter button, video mode etc.
The idea was to create an app that display the camera preview without any unnecessary thing on the screen. After a quick prototype on Sketch the app only contains two buttons (camera switch, settings). Other actions are available with gestures.
When I submited the app to the App Store, I got a rejection because they found the app useless. So I thought on an other feature to add. Many streamers use an overlay around there webcam, this allows to get clean borders and sometimes displaying stream alerts like subscribtion, follow etc.
I designed several overlays on Sketch, with color variation. I added them to the app above the camera preview, you can change them by swipping left or right. I submitted the app again, and the app was accepted without any troubles.
Next steps
The TODO list for this app is quite big, since I started late to work on this app. The main things are designing and adding more overlays, the possibility to import custom overlay, make use of the new API on iOS 13 to display both cameras (front and rear) on the screen and the last but not least adding face filters as you can find on Instagram and Snapshat. I also want to improve the App Store page of the app, I’m not really proud of what I’ve done and I’m sure I can improve this.
