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Reflex – video weirdness at your fingertips

Strange goings-on in this video app

Price: Free to download
Subscription: $3/£3 monthly or $18/£18 yearly
Version: 1.1
Size:
12 MB
Developer:
Sviatoslav Belmeha

Reflex

Reflex is a pretty weird app. From its App Store description which doesn’t give much away beyond it being an AR video effects app, to the strange, odd, and trippy effects themselves. Reflex is an interesting way to while away an evening.

The Predator filter makes you think something might be lurking somewhere… probably a Predator

Because, in reality, that’s pretty much all we did. We played around with the filters – which work with both video and photo – and we shared the strange results with a few choice friends. Our thoughts generally were “okay, that was cool. What’s next?”

It’s a question we frequently ask of these apps. There’s no doubt iPhones and their cameras can do some pretty remarkable things, but how remarkable are they without a clear purpose?

This could be an album cover. Maybe…

Reflex offers a variety of filters. We’re talking Predator, which provides a shimmery backdrop in which individuals seem both there, but not there, just like the movie franchise. We’re talking Blurred Motions, which blurs the edges of everything as you move the camera around – akin to having far too many drinks and trying to stop the world from moving. We’re talking Slice Time, which employs the kind of weird cascading glitch you may remember from 90s computer monitors. We’re talking Stretching, which pulls apart parts of an image to give it a bizarre, warped feel.

As much as we love this dramatic depiction of the world, we do wonder what purpose it could serve

We could go on… and the app really does. Across 17 different filters, we take in Money, Kaleidescope, ASCII Art, Pixel Art and more, each incredibly well-executed, producing unexpected but pretty impressive results.

Poor boy…

But again, we ask, what is this for? The app fails to answer these by offering all manner of tools to edit the intensity and color, and it does all this for a monthly or yearly fee, following other image apps that have switched to a subscription service. While you can test all of the filters, you can’t capture anything without paying for a subscription.

There has been a glitch

While in the grand scheme of things a few bucks a month is not a lot of money, it’s pretty far from a must-buy app. Reflex is good fun to toy around with, but we’d love to know what kind of person would use it enough to justify a yearly subscription. If that’s you, one thing’s certain – we bet your social media feed looks pretty cool.