Show HN: Realtime Magic-Eye Mirror

namuol.github.io

2 points

10 months ago

I've been learning all about autostereograms (aka "Magic eye" illusions) recently and had a fun idea: If I can somehow get a depth image of my webcam, I can see myself in a "magic (eye) mirror" on my screen. It turns out that it's actually pretty feasible to get real-time depth estimates, at least on newer hardware and in browsers with WebGPU. To my delight, this worked pretty well, so I decided to polish it somewhat and share it here.

To be honest, all the heavy lifting is done by the depth-estimation model [1], otherwise this demo just wouldn't be possible.

I will warn you that viewing this may take some practice if you aren't already very well-versed in autostereogram viewing, and you will probably only want to run this on somewhat beefier laptop/desktop hardware, preferably in a Chromium browser.

For something less intense and mobile-friendly, I also made a sibling app that works with still images: https://namuol.github.io/magic-eye-anything

Both projects are open-source:

- https://github.com/namuol/magic-eye-mirror - https://github.com/namuol/magic-eye-anything

[1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/webgpu-realtime-depth-e...