Kirk Ewing and Caspar Thykier are two Scottish video game veterans, brought up in the development of the likes of Grand Theft Auto. So far, they’ve developed two game-changing personalization apps – namely, Veemee Live Wallpaper and Veemee Creator, which are both available from the Android Play Store. Both Veemee apps redefine your home screen, by placing a three dimensional avatar in the front and center of you phone UI, thus bring your device “to life.” This allows the user to create a personalized 3D character, which you can dress in the virtual store, and then export it to your Android desktop to function as a virtual playmate. So you can watch as your Veemee makes itself at home on your phone, reacting to your actions as well as the digital data around – be it the weather, incoming calls, or the music you play. It’s not quite like anything else you’ve seen. Well, except maybe The Sims, if you’re familiar with that – but your Veemee happily resides on the desktop of your mobile, and you don’t really have to worry about dictating its life and buying a house, finding a job, and so on. In other words, if you liked creating Sims, customizing their features and so-on, then you’ll love Veemee.
The Vemee Live Wallpaper app allows you to choose one of eight pre-made Veemees to live on your Android device, which you can interact with – poke them, shake them, or just throw them around. You can also check out what your Veemee is thinking, by tapping their “Think Links”, which will have interesting new things every day, and there are visual effects and Veemee animations in response to your local weather forecast. Your Veemee will also dance if you play music. The Veemee Creator app acts as a companion to the Veemee Live Wallpaper app, and allows you to completely customize your Veemee character – there’s an ever-expanding virtual store with clothing and costumes to dress your Veemee, including real-world brands such as Billabong, Element, and Paul Frank. You can share your Veemee with friends, by taking a picture within the app, and you can import any image to use as a background. And if you create a Veemee account, you’ll receive 2000 free gems to spend on virtual fashions.
One of the Veemee team members had built the avatar system for GTA V, and it was decided that they could do something new with the avatar concept, and thus Veemee was born. This became the world’s first character-driven live wallpaper, and now you can have a little person living on your phone. So now you have a virtual friend to hang out with, on the home-screen of your Android device. And thus, Veemee’s competitors are the likes of Talking Tom and Siri, though the Veemee team believes that they’ve vastly improved on this sort of concept. The Veemee vision is not simply to create a plaything, but create a character-driven UI and concierge. And while Veemee is for everyone, Kirk notes that their biggest user audience so far has been women between 16 and 35 (according to the founders, but many of the staff at my office, men and women in that age range, liked it). But you might want to hurry up and download it – the first 5000 downloads get 2000 free Vbux, which brings us to the business model – the Veemee app is free, but you’ll want to buy clothes and customizations, and those will cost you Vbux. And if you fall in love with the app, you’ll want more, for which you might spend actual money. It’s basically a freemium model.
