Want to get in on the modded reality action? Now it’s easier than ever with swapiies, a free new iOS app that lets you swap perspectives with a friend. The app connects two phones so that each phone sees what the other one captures with its camera. The sharing and discovery is local, so the phones don’t need a cellular connection or even to be on the same wifi network. There’s even a VR mode for more immersive sharing experience.
Swapiies is a very simple app but it allow you to explore a range of fun experiences. Just being able to glimpse your friend’s perspective of a scene can be enlightening. It’s not like livestreaming either, where you are broadcasting to an audience; swapiies is a low latency, local connection between you and a friend. It lets you experience in a new way, rather than sharifying your experiences.
The VR mode also opens up a world of new realities, the simplest being to just connect two phones mounted in VR headsets for some true eye swapping. In fact, Swapiies can be used to quickly recreate many of the modded reality experiments I have tried over the years—everything from third person climbing to [seeing the world through your camera].(/i-am-a-camera) And while the video quality and field of view isn’t great, being able to play around with different perspective sharing setups this easily is pretty cool.
This app was also my first experiment with outsourcing the coding part of a project. I don’t have enough time or background to code up all of the projects I am interested in, so I want to contract out some of this work. For this project, I worked with Volpis. They took my idea and designs and created v1 of swapiies, and I think it turned out pretty well.
So if you have iPhone, give swapiies a try. It’s free and even works pretty well on older iOS devices that you may have laying around.