Glitchy camera
a circuit-bent camera simulator in the browser
Details
- External ID
- 47033954
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Glitchy camera
- Website domain
- glitchycam.com
- Launched
- Feb. 16, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 173
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9353099730458221
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Fun little side project I built after learning about circuit bending in cameras for intentional glitch effect. It is browser based camera toy where you "rewire" CCD pin pairs, turn knobs to get different glitch artefacts in real time to capture as photos. I had fun learning to simulate different pin modes - channel split, hue/phase shifts, horizontal clock delays, colour kill etc.Here are some photos taken: https://glitchycam.com/galleryI intentionally leaned towards skeuomorphic design for nostalgia. I miss the days where I'd spend hours making a button to look like a physical button. Here I chose to make it look like a "good enough" Teenage Engineering device UI.I tested/used GPT-5.3-Codex to build this from scratch, since there was a lot of hype around it on X. Maybe I wasn’t using it right, but I found it needed a lot of code cleanup at every step and a lot of hand holding along the way. It missed details/nuances and didn't land the skeuomorphic buttons or the interaction polish. It mostly helped with boilerplate where there wasn't much thinking/detailing. It did give a basic starting point for the effect calculations, but didn't really move the needle on the details.Please give it a go and let me know what you think - your photos and video never leave your browser (you can download them if you choose to). Everything is processed locally in your browser (works offline), nothing is uploaded or seen by anyone.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- circuit-bent camera simulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a front-end browser toy that accesses the webcam via `getUserMedia` and runs WebGL/Canvas pixel shaders to simulate glitch and circuit-bending effects.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Physical circuit bending cameras, Lomo cameras, Guitar pedals, AI image generation tools
Concerns raised: Very slow performance (0.5-1 fps), Device heating up after a few minutes, Certificate/security issues with some networks, Unclear how to switch between photo and video modes
Feature requests: Video recording capability, Knob to control HCLK effect intensity, Compact hackable point-and-click glitch camera with loadable patches, Performance optimization to reduce device heating
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 129 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #14 of 130 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 108 days after the earliest competitor.
- GLITCH-FX · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I made some transistor animations · hn · 2026-07-24 · 212 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Circuit Artist · hn · 2025-12-31 · 135 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- ComfyUI_RetroTape · github · 2026-09-10 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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- Strange Attractors · hn · 2025-10-31 · 804 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I successfully failed at one-shot-ing a video codec like h.264 · hn · 2026-04-04 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I built an Open Source screen timer for the m5stickc (Arduino) · hn · 2026-01-06 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.