Liquid Mirror

Live webcam pixels are cropped, blurred, tone-mapped, warped, and poured into a rounded metal button. Tune the optical illusion in real time.

Each frame is sampled from your webcam, center-cropped to match the mirror ratio, and slightly blurred to simulate imperfect optics. Then two radial bulge passes bend the geometry inward so the center appears deeper than the edges.

In simplified form, each warped pixel uses:p' = c + (1 - e)(p - c), wheree = (1 - r / R) · k for pixels inside the warp radius.

After geometry, a metallic tone map compresses highlights and tints channels. Conceptually:I_out = mix(I, tint(rolloff(I)), m), wherem is the Metal slider.

Everything runs in a local requestAnimationFrame loop in your browser. No camera frames are uploaded.

How this works

Frames are cropped, blurred, warped twice, and tone-mapped to emulate liquid metal.

Warp core: p' = c + (1 - e)(p - c)

Tone map core: I_out = mix(I, tint(rolloff(I)), m)

All processing is local to this browser tab.

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