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Glitchy camera

a circuit-bent camera simulator in the browser

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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.

HN · launched Feb 16, 2026 · 173 upvotes (top 6%) · 1 view

Niche: image processing and editing tools · 260 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▼ -28% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • Content generation
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

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 : 320 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #31 of 321 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 108 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.