Bemo is a fantastic augmented reality (AR) camera app for iOS. You can use the rear or front camera and add funny animated AR 3D stickers to the scene, record your own videos and share it via social networks.
I’ve been toying around with many ARKit camera apps in the last two months, including Figment AR, Meing, Holo, Flotogram, and AR Toy Camera among others. It’s fun adding animated 3D objects to the real world and apply camera effects in AR. For example, I created this really cool Christmas video greeting card using Meing Camera (AR camera app) and Funimate (video editing). Sometimes I found it useful actually using several apps to produce a more creative and interesting AR video clip.
What Makes Bemo Unique?
What makes Bemo unique is that it features fantastic animated low-poly 3D stickers that are hilarious to watch. They completely transform a boring video into something really funny and enjoyable to watch. It promotes creativity and ignites the imagination. Once you have this app in your hand, you always try to find ways to create funny videos with it and share it with others.
Bemo also includes a built-in social video tube, which allows you to view other people’s creations. It’s amazing seeing the cool videos that people were able to create with it.
When you signup to Bemo, you get your own Bemo profile page where you can share your content with your Bemo friends. There is a “Friends” tab on your profile page, where you can search and add new friends to your list of friends. Once you create a “Beem” (this is how a video clip is called in Bemo), you can easily share it with the people on your friend list.
Very Easy to Create Awesome AR Videos
One of the main advantages of Bemo is its ease-of-use. The app makes it so easy for everyone to create entertaining videos with it. You first choose the 3D category and tap the 3D animated stickers you want to add to the scene. Then you can resize, rotate and position it wherever you like—it’s super easy.
The main downside of this app is that it doesn’t allow you to position several 3D stickers on the scene, just one. having the option to add text is nice, but still, I would have liked to create a more complex scene with this app so I can be even more creative and capture even funnier moments on video.
The app also requires registration and I’ve already read some negative comments of people complaining about it. I don’t think it a big deal, but I can understand when it’s coming from. Not everyone wants to share the email, or mass around with a registration process. Some people just want to use the app, see if they like it or not and then decide whether it at all, they want to create their own profile page.
Here is a closer look at BEMO app in action.
Bemo Compared to other AR Camera Apps
I have to give it to the developer, NotKnownHere Ltd, this company did an excellent job in making an app that differentiates itself from other iOS camera apps. Other AR camera apps like Vixeo for example, gave me more freedom to create a marvelous AR scene. However, with Bemo, I was able to easily and effortlessly create funny videos.
With Vixeo it took me a much more effort as I needed to become a director and move the 3D models around to create an entertaining video.
Here is a video I’ve created using Vixeo.
This is a video I’ve created using Bemo. Sorry for the low quality, it was post edited poorly by me, I’ll do a better work next time.
As you can see, Bemo make it super easy for everyone to make funny videos. This is very important because the app immediately becomes accessible to a broader audience, therefore encourages more people to start using it and share their creations. You don’t have to mass around with complicated controls, just choose the scene, add the animated 3D sticker and make sure the scene is well framed.
The embedded social video sharing feature immediately grabs the user’s attention. Once a user sees those fabulous videos that other people have created, it ignites a strong desire to create videos with it. It also inspires users and gives them some cool ideas to think about. It’s amazing how simple it is to create entertaining and funny videos using Bemo and share it with the world—it’s Brilliant!
AR Experience
I think Bemo really shows the potential of AR when it comes to making creative an unique videos. Just think about it, it’s not easy to find something interesting or funny to shoot with a standard camera app. You need to be at a certain place at the right time to be able to capture a unique moment, let alone a funny one.
With Bemo, you can create funny videos wherever you are at any time of the day. You don’t need to actually wait for anything to happen, rely on 3rd parties to be where you want them to be, or doing what you want them to do. I was in my home, sitting near the living room’s table. My cat was sitting on the table. I launched Bemo, chose the funny mouse sticker and place it next to my cat and recorded a video of it. I really liked the end results. It took me only a few seconds to place the 3D model and a few seconds to record it on video.
Of course, being able to use virtual 3D characters, especially funny ones and position them in the real world—make all the difference in the world.
There are a large variety of animated 3D stickers to choose from. Many of them are made really simple, so they can be mixed well with real-world objects to produce funny results. For example, I’ve seen a video of someone who took a funny line art animation and put it on a french fries and it turned to be really cute and funny.
The Bemo browser allows you to video the person who shared the video, add it to your friends, like this video and see how many likes the video has received.
Conclusion
Bemo is a great example of a good use of AR technology. It allows anyone at any age to create some really cool, funny and entertaining videos with just a few clicks. It’s so easy to use that it feels like second nature.
Bemo provides its users with a wide variety of pre-animated 3D stickers with sound and music as well. The app supports both the front and rear iPhone and iPad cameras and has built-in social features. The low-poly 3D stickers look great and the animations are immensely entertaining.
As of the time of reviewing the app (version 1.3.1), it’s still not optimized for the iPad, but it is optimized for iPhone X. It wasn’t a big problem though, I was still able to do whatever I like without any limitations. It also doesn’t support landscape orientation.
What can I say? This one of the best AR camera apps that I’ve used to date. It is by far definitely the most entertaining one. I think that combining the video output with another video effects app can yield even more interesting results (that’s what I usually do). Overall, a fantastic Augmented Reality app, download it!
P.S. Bemo was first released without ARKit support, therefore it can run on devices running iOS 10.3 or later. ARKit was added a month after. If you have an ARKit-powered device, you obviously can enjoy a better AR experience, with the option to place the 3D models onto real-world surface—but the app will work on any iPhone or iPad device running this OS or later.
You can download Bemo from the App Store here.