Isekai
A webcam toy: frame a window with two L-shaped hands and the video inside is redrawn as comic or manga.
Context
Isekai is a webcam toy that runs in the browser. Hold up both hands in an "L" and the four fingertips become the corners of a window; inside it, the live video is shown through whichever effect is switched on. It is modelled on a short clip I saw online, and I built it as a fun demo, not a product. It is a 2026 prototype.
How it works
Hand tracking is MediaPipe's HandLandmarker from @mediapipe/tasks-vision, tracking two hands, entirely in the browser. There is no backend and no account, and nothing leaves the machine except MediaPipe's small usage ping. Heat and Negative are plain browser filters. Comic and Manga are a hand-written WebGL2 shader pipeline: Kuwahara smoothing, lightness banding in OKLab, difference-of-Gaussians ink lines, and a halftone pass on top for Manga.
The rest is gestures. Pinching with both hands gives an upright rectangle instead of the L-frame quad. A thumbs up or down cycles the effect. A ✌️ takes a photo after a 3-2-1 countdown, with Save or Discard. Two fists toggle the window off and on.
What got thrown away
The goal was a live anime redraw, and none of the attempts held up. AnimeGANv2 in the browser was too slow. A local diffusion model ran at 8 to 14 fps and came out soft. A drawn character-head overlay looked bad, and an SVG-filter toon effect was cut. Only the effects that looked right shipped. A hosted anime restyle is still being tried, behind a flag.