The new app that's trying to make you social without looking at your phone screen

folarin okunola

July 17, 2015 9:27 PM

This is the premise of YouTuber Casey Neistat's new social sharing app, Beme, and it's a familiar one.

Screenshots from the Beme app

"Instead of seeing the world with your eyes, you're seeing it through your phone."

This is the premise of YouTuber Casey Neistat's new social sharing app, Beme, and it's a familiar one: You're at a concert, focused on trying to capture the moment so you can post it on Facebook and Instagram. But in doing so, you're completely taken out of the moment.

"Social media is supposed to be a digital or virtual version of who we are as people," Neistat says in an announcement video for the app. "Instead it's this highly sculpted, calculated, calibrated version of who we are, told through filters that make our eyes bluer and carefully selected images to portray a version of who we are that doesn't really resemble the reality of things."

One of the main features of Beme is that users don't need to look at their screens to record videos. Just press it against your chest and the app will use the iPhone's proximity sensor as a record button. (The app is currently only for iOS.)

To take a selfie or vlog, you can press your iPhone up against the wall. It's a strange, awkward behavior — how many people are willing to press their phone's screen against a wall in the middle of a concert? — but it's the only way for the proximity sensor to activate.

As demonstrated in the announcement video, to watch a video, hold down a person's username — like Snapchat before it eliminated the need to hold down. And just like Snapchats, moments (known as Bemes) are ephemeral; they disappear right after you view them.

"Everything you see, you see for the first time and the last time," "Everything you see, you see for the first time and the last time," Neistat says in the video.

Instead of giving likes or hearts, though, like on Periscope, you can send selfies on Beme by tapping the screen — which gives the most genuine of reactions, according to Neistat.

This seems like a fun app and we can't wait to see it in action. Watch the announcement video above.

folarin okunola