NixiCam is a Chrome extension that retouches, reframes and records your camera inside Google Meet, Zoom Web and Teams. Skin smoothing that leaves eyelashes alone, subtle face shaping, 23 colour looks, aspect-ratio cropping and a snapshot button. It runs on your own GPU and installs no camera driver, so it works on locked-down work laptops.
Two-day trial of everything, no card. Six looks stay free after that.
Works in:Google MeetZoom WebMicrosoft TeamsDiscordTwitchYouTube LiveLoomWebex
Drag the handle to compare. Left is untouched, right is retouched.
Look: Livestream Glow
Drag to compare
Before
After
Pick a look
Adjust it
Jaw22%
Eyes20%
Skin smoothing60%
Lip colour32%
The Jaw and Eyes sliders here run the same WebGL shader the extension uses, on a still photo with hand-placed landmarks instead of a live tracker. Skin and Lip are approximated in the demo; in the extension they are separate shader passes.
What it does
Nine things, and they all run at once
Every control is live while you are on the call. Nothing needs re-rendering or a restart.
Face shaping
Jaw taper, eye size, nose width and chin lift, driven off the landmarks tracked each frame. The warp is local to the face, so the bookshelf behind you stays straight.
JawEyesNoseChin
Skin smoothing
A bilateral filter, which is the useful kind: it flattens pore shadows, shine and redness but stops at edges, so eyelashes, brows, the iris and your hairline stay sharp.
PoresRednessUnder-eyeShine
23 looks
Colour grades rather than gimmicks. Natural and Studio for work; Livestream Glow, Korean Dewy and Tokyo Cyber if you want something louder. One slider scales any of them down when it is too much.
6 free17 Pro12 custom slots
Makeup
Lip colour keyed to the lip outline in eight shades, eight iris colours, cheek blush and a highlight bloom. Useful when a call appears in your calendar ten minutes before it starts.
8 lip shades8 eye coloursBlushBloom
Lighting
Most laptop webcams are underlit and slightly green. There is a soft frontal light, a green-magenta white balance correction, an exposure lift and teeth brightening.
Face lightWhite balanceExposureTeeth
Background blur
Person segmentation runs locally, same as everything else, with blur adjustable from nothing to a full bokeh throw. No frames leave the machine to make it work.
0–100% blurBokehLocal model
Framing
Change aspect ratio, zoom up to 3× and drag to pan, without touching the camera. The cropped frame is the stream, so the other side gets a properly framed picture rather than a letterboxed one.
16:9 · 4:3 · 1:1 · 9:16 · 21:91×–3× zoomDrag to pan
Snapshots
Pull a full-resolution still out of your own camera with the look and framing already applied. Optional before/after pair if you want to show someone the difference. Three and five second timers.
PNG or JPEGBefore/after pairCopies to clipboard
Recording
Record the tab your call is in, or just your own camera. Chrome mutes a tab while capturing it, so NixiCam routes the audio back to your speakers — nothing goes silent halfway through. Your mic can be mixed in.
Tab video + audioMic mixingWebM / VP9
Where people use it
Same engine, dialled differently
These are the setups that come up most in support email.
Client calls
You are the product on a pitch call. Natural or Studio at low intensity, Face Light up if the room is bad, framed to head and shoulders so you fill the tile instead of floating in the middle of it.
Natural / StudioFace LightHead & shoulders
Early standups
The 8am camera-on meeting you did not plan for. Smoothing, under-eye lift and shine control take the edge off without the plastic look that makes people ask if your camera is broken.
Under-eyeShineSmooth Lines
Streaming
You can push it further than a work call would allow. Livestream Glow, K-Pop Idol and Tokyo Cyber are stage looks, and the intensity slider pulls the whole thing back in one move when it reads as too much.
Livestream GlowK-Pop IdolIntensity
Vertical clips
Shoot 9:16 for Shorts, Reels and TikTok, or 1:1 for a profile loop, straight out of the browser. Zoom and pan to crop in, then record the camera to a WebM — no editor round trip just to reframe.
9:161:1Camera recording
Teaching and webinars
Record the tab the session runs in, with the call audio captured and still audible in the room. Mix your mic in; the finished WebM lands in your downloads when you stop.
Tab recordingMic mixingAudio loopback
Headshots
Set the look, set the framing, hit the five-second timer and sit still. You get a full-resolution still with the retouch applied, or a before/after pair if someone needs convincing.
TimerBefore/afterPNG / JPEG
How it works
Four things worth knowing before you install it
Face shaping
The warp is local, not global
Face apps that stretch the whole frame are easy to spot: door frames bend, and the wall behind you breathes when you move. NixiCam computes displacement around the tracked facial vertices only, falling off smoothly to zero a short distance out. The jaw tapers; the room stays still.
You can watch it happen in the demo above — the Jaw and Eyes sliders there call the same shader.
Makeup
Lip colour that follows the lip line
The colour is keyed to the vermilion border rather than painted into a fixed oval, so it holds when you talk and does not smear onto your teeth. Eight shades, matte through to gloss.
Peach Coral
Work laptops
Nothing gets installed at system level
Camo, OBS and ManyCam route video through a virtual camera driver, which is a kernel-level install and needs administrator rights — commonly blocked on managed machines. NixiCam is an extension. It works inside Chrome's normal media APIs.
The honest caveat: if your organisation blocks the Chrome Web Store outright, you will still need IT to allow the extension.
Admin rightsNot needed
Driver installNone
Runs inChrome, Edge, Brave, Opera
Privacy
The video never leaves the machine
Every frame is processed in WebGL2 on your GPU and discarded. The face landmarks come from a MediaPipe model bundled with the extension, not a service. Nothing is recorded unless you press record, and that file saves locally.
The extension makes exactly one network request in its life: verifying a licence key against Polar when you type one in. Details are in the privacy policy.
Video uploadedNone
Landmarks storedNone
Network callsLicence check only
Compare
Against the other ways of doing this
If what you want is to look better on a video call, without a production setup and without an argument with IT, this is how the options actually stack up.
NixiCam
OBS Studio
ManyCam / Camo
Meet & Zoom built-in
Needs admin rights or a driver
No
Yes
Yes
No
Works on a locked-down work laptop
Yes
No
No
Yes
Time to first call
About a minute
An evening
Install and restart
Already there
Face shaping
Jaw, eyes, nose, chin
No
No
No
Skin smoothing
Edge-preserving
Plugin, heavy on CPU
Blurs the whole face
One slider
Colour looks
23 built in
Manual LUTs
A handful
One or two
Virtual makeup
Lips, eyes, blush
No
No
No
Reframing, zoom and pan
Yes, crops the stream
Yes
Yes
No
Adjustable mid-call
Yes
Second window
Second window
Limited
Where the work runs
GPU shaders
CPU encode
CPU encode
Cloud routing
Video leaves your machine
Never
No
Account / cloud
Yes
OBS is a broadcast studio and does a great deal NixiCam does not — scenes, overlays, multiple sources. If that is what you are building, build it there. This is for the browser call you are already in.
Setup
About a minute, start to finish
One
Install it
Add it from the Chrome Web Store. No desktop installer, no driver prompt, no restart.
Two
Open your call
Meet, Zoom Web, Teams, Discord or anything else in the browser. NixiCam attaches to the camera stream the site asks for. Refresh the tab if it was already open.
Three
Pick a look
Start with Natural and turn things up from there. Everything updates live, so you can adjust it mid-call without anyone seeing a freeze.
Pricing
Three plans, same features
The only difference is how long the licence lasts. Two-day trial of everything when you install, no card. Six looks and the core controls stay free afterwards.
Billing runs through Polar. NixiCam never sees your card details.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
If yours is not here, send a message and it will be answered by email.
Usually. Camo, OBS and ManyCam install a virtual camera driver, which is a system-level install requiring admin rights, and that is what IT policies tend to block. NixiCam is a Chrome extension working inside the browser's normal media APIs, so there is nothing to approve at that level. The exception is an organisation that blocks the Chrome Web Store entirely — then you will need it allowlisted.
On the Zoom web client, yes. Not in the Zoom desktop app — that does not use the browser's camera stack, so an extension cannot reach it. Same for the Teams and Discord desktop apps; use their web versions.
Yes, and it is the single biggest jump in picture quality available to you — the camera in a phone is far better than the one in a laptop lid. NixiCam retouches whatever camera your computer recognises, so once the phone is presenting itself as a webcam it turns up in the camera list like any other and everything works normally.
On a Mac with an iPhone this needs nothing installed: prop the phone up near the Mac and iPhone Camera appears in Meet's or Zoom's camera menu on its own. On Android 14 or later, plug in by USB and turn on webcam mode from the USB notification. Apps like DroidCam and Iriun work too, but they install a virtual camera driver, which needs admin rights and is usually blocked on a work laptop.
Yes. The frame is cropped and rescaled on the GPU before the call receives it, across Original, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 9:16 and 21:9, with 1× to 3× zoom and drag-to-pan. Because the recomposed frame is the stream, the other side sees a correctly framed picture rather than a letterboxed one.
You can record the tab the call is in, including its audio, with your microphone mixed in if you want. Chrome normally mutes a tab while capturing it, so NixiCam routes the captured audio back to your speakers — the call keeps playing out loud while it records. The file saves as WebM. Recording only ever starts when you click it.
23 built in. Six are free forever — Natural, Soft Glow, Studio, Warm, Smooth Lines and Clean Girl — and the other 17, including Livestream Glow, Meitu Pure, Korean Dewy, K-Pop Idol and Tokyo Cyber, are Pro. Any look can be scaled with the intensity slider, and you can save 12 of your own, then export them to a file and import them on another machine.
No. Frames are processed in WebGL2 on your GPU and discarded after each one. The face landmarks come from a MediaPipe model bundled inside the extension, not a service. The only network request the extension ever makes is verifying a licence key against Polar when you enter one.
The work runs on the GPU as shader passes rather than on the CPU, so on any machine from the last few years the overhead is small. If you are on integrated graphics with a heavy call already running, turning off background blur — the most expensive effect — helps most. If WebGL2 is unavailable, the extension passes the camera through untouched rather than breaking the call.
That is up to you, and it is easy to overdo. The smoothing is edge-preserving, so it does not produce the wax-figure look even at high settings, but face shaping past roughly 30% starts to read as visibly altered on a big screen. For work calls, Natural at low intensity is the safe answer. Drag the comparison handle in the demo above to judge it yourself.
Installing the extension starts two days of full access. No card, no signup, and nothing charges when it ends — you drop back to the six free looks and the core controls. If you buy later, the yearly plan has a 30-day refund.
Copy the key straight from the Polar receipt email, and watch for a trailing space. Activation needs a working connection the first time. If you bought in the last few minutes, give it a moment for Polar to sync. Still stuck: the support page has more, and messages get a reply by email.
Two days of everything, no card.
If it is not for you, uninstalling takes one click and nothing was charged.
