How Streaming Platforms Grow Viewership With AR Effects

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Key takeaways

• Banuba Face AR SDK builds a 3D face mesh with up to 3,308 vertices through direct 3D reconstruction, so effects stay locked to the face during the fast movement and awkward angles that define live video.
• b.stage reached 1 million monthly active users in two years using Banuba beauty effects and 3D masks in its live streaming and chat features.
• Banuba ships a ready-made Agora extension for iOS, Android, and Web plus an Amazon IVS sample project, so an existing streaming stack gets AR effects without a custom rendering layer.

Why does viewership depend on what happens before the frame is encoded?

A streaming platform does not control what a creator broadcasts, only how good it looks and how much fun it is to produce. The two levers the platforms own are creator supply (how many people go live and how often) and session length (how long viewers stay). Both are decided in the camera preview, before a single frame reaches the encoder.

This is where augmented reality live streaming features earn their place. Real-time beauty effects remove the "I don't look camera-ready" objection that keeps casual creators from going live at all. 3D masks and gesture-triggered effects give viewers something to react to, which is what turns a passive watch into chat activity and donations. Virtual backgrounds remove the privacy objection: a creator streaming from a bedroom or a shared office does not have to show it.

Banuba's AR effects example 

How do AR effects hold up under live conditions?

Live video is the hardest case for face tracking. Nobody sits still, lighting is whatever the room offers, and hands, microphones, and phones cross the face constantly. Tracking that drifts under those conditions is worse than no effects at all: the artifact is visible to every viewer at once.

Banuba's engine constructs a 3D head model directly from the camera feed rather than inferring 2D landmarks and lifting them into 3D. The result is a mesh with up to 3,308 vertices that holds tracking under up to 70% facial occlusion, across the full -90° to +90° head-angle range, and at distances up to 7 meters from the camera. The 7-meter figure matters more than it sounds for streaming: it covers full-body setups, gaming rigs, and group broadcasts where the creator is not sitting at arm's length from a laptop.

Effects run on the broadcaster's device, so nothing is sent to a server for processing. Banuba's virtual webcam features, including face filters, face touch-up, and background removal, are specified for devices with a 1280x720 camera at a minimum of 30 FPS, which covers the phones and laptops most creators already stream from.

What does the integration actually look like?

Most streaming platforms already run a real-time transport layer, so the question is whether AR can be added to it rather than around it.

For Agora-based stacks, Banuba maintains an extension for iOS, Android and Web, and Agora handles the integration on its side, so virtual backgrounds, beauty filters and AR masks drop into an existing Agora pipeline. For Amazon IVS, Banuba publishes a working Android sample that wires the SDK into an IVS broadcast. Web, Unity and native SDKs are available for platforms that run their own transport. The Face AR SDK documentation covers requirements, setup, and configuration for each platform, and the Agora filter plugin repositories show the integration end to end.

Effect supply is a separate problem from rendering. Banuba's asset store carries around 1,000 ready-made masks and filters, custom effects can be built in Banuba Studio, and effects can be stored in the AR cloud and downloaded on demand so the app binary stays small.

Banuba's background subtraction in action 

What did a streaming platform get out of it?

bemyfriends built b.stage as a SaaS platform for the global fandom business, giving artists, esports teams, and creators such as T1, Sentinels, Hwasa, and Chungha their own branded space for live streaming, 1:1 chats, memberships, and commerce.

Banuba powers the AR layer in b.stage live streaming and video chat, specifically face touch-up and 3D masks. The product reason is precise: a celebrity going live to a global fandom needs to look consistent with their public image, and natural-looking touch-up does that without blurring skin texture the way a generic smoothing filter would. In May 2024, two years after launch, b.stage announced it had passed 1 million monthly active users, with visitors from 224 countries and over 130 customers globally.

Get started

Banuba's AR live streaming features are used by 120+ clients across streaming, video conferencing, and social apps. Request a free trial on the augmented reality live streaming product page to test the effects on your own devices.