Casablanca

Losing eye contact is one of the quiet costs of video meetings: people who avoid the lens are perceived as less sympathetic and less trustworthy. Casablanca addresses that directly. It is a virtual camera that sits between your physical webcam and your conferencing app, re-rendering your face in real time so you appear to look straight into the lens even while you are reading a script, checking slides or looking at the person's tile on screen. It works like having a tiny camera in the middle of your display—without the camera.

Casablanca is developed by Brainbox GmbH and has been used commercially since an early beta in February 2023. It is used by corporate trainers, online educators, recruiters, and sales and public-sector teams, and it works in every major conferencing platform because it simply registers as a standard camera. The publisher reports academic research on the tool finding that users are perceived as more sympathetic and competent in recruiting interviews.

The defining architectural choice is privacy. All image data is processed on the user's own machine—nothing is uploaded, and the company states it never sees your meetings. That local processing is also why the correction can run live without the latency of a round trip to a server. Requirements are modest but not trivial: a modern Intel i5/i7 with Iris Xe graphics or a Ryzen 7640HS on Windows, an Apple M1 or newer on Mac. Licensing is a straightforward monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time perpetual licence.