Computer vision / 2026 / Live in the browser
Cam Chaos Booth
Twelve real-time webcam effects in one photo booth, with a self-timer and a mirrored preview, each effect a separate per-pixel pass over the camera feed.
01
The problem
A booth has to feel like a mirror and let you pose. An unflipped front camera makes you lean the wrong way, and a capture button you press yourself means every shot catches you reaching for it.
02
How I approached it
Each effect is its own function over the frame's ImageData, picked from one table, so adding a thirteenth is one function and one row. The camera frame is drawn flipped by default, the way phone front cameras preview, and the saved shot matches what was on screen. Captures use a 3 or 10 second self-timer and canvas.toBlob, which encodes off the main thread, and each object URL is revoked when its shot is cleared.
03
The outcome
Twelve looks with an intensity slider and a glitch layer, keyboard shortcuts that stay quiet while a control has focus, and a strip of downloadable shots. 10 unit tests cover the pixel effects.
Related work
Four image filters written twice, once as a Canvas2D loop and once as a WGSL compute shader, running on the same webcam frame side by side with honest timings.
ASL fingerspelling to text from a webcam. It reads hand geometry instead of pixels, so all 26 letters work with no training, and two seconds of calibration per letter fits it to your own hand.
A five-phase energy sequence that doubles as a calculus visualiser: the blue phase renders partial sums, asymptotic rings and Zeno-style halving.