There is an app in Apple’s App Store that can turn your iPhone into a webcam for your Mac or Windows PC—EpocCam. EpocCam comes from a company called Elgato, which is owned by the more well-known Corsair.
Recently, Corsair announced that alongside its daughter company Elgato, it is partnering up with Snap. The partnership brings native support for the famous Snapchat AR filters to EpocCam.
To give you a little more background, EpocCam can be used with many of the popular video communication platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and OBS Studio. It makes use of your phone’s camera and can live stream in 1080p, HDR, Elgato claims. It is a good solution if you are on a business trip and want to have better video quality than your laptop’s webcam.
Now, you could still use Snapchat’s iconic filters before, but you first had to go through the Snap Camera software. Difference is that now it all comes bundled up natively in EpocCam itself. While in the app, you can choose between 15 Snap Lenses for EpocCam, including face masks, background changes, and filters that you can customize.
The EpocCam app is free to download on iOS, and all of the above-mentioned Snap Lenses are included in that version. Some of the best features, though, like being able to use your iPhone’s microphone, for example, are locked. If you want to enable them you will have to buy the Pro version, which will cost you $7.99. Of course, the Pro version also removes that pesky watermark slapped in every video call you make.
Elgato mentioned that it plans to introduce even more of the trendy filters to the EpocCam app in the future. Unfortunately, while the app was also available for Android in the past, that is no longer the case. However, you can still find suitable replacements such as DroidCam.
