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Visual effects made using Para Editor

Inspiration

The Nintendo 3DS made me want photos I could look into. I wanted to take an ordinary photo, give it depth, and make its perspective respond to the person looking at it using your phones camera and gyroscope to track movement.

What it does

ParaEditor turns ordinary photos into interactive scenes with depth and perspective. Head tracking or device tilt changes the view as you move. You can edit the image, apply mathematical treatments, draw your own marks, and turn the composition into a moving piece. Effects are built from mathematical blocks. You can rearrange those blocks, open the functions inside them, and get down to the executable source that draws the image.

A texture can become a photo treatment or the basis of a custom brush. You can experiment with the math, see what happens, and keep the result as something you made.

Radeon Cloud GPUs handle the heavier AI preparation while your device handles the creative interaction and rendering. This split allows for the editor to run in a web browser and on any device with an internet connection.

How we built it

The editor uses Preact and a custom WebGL2 renderer, with shaders for the mathematical effects and perspective rendering. Cloudflare Pages and Workers host the application and its APIs. Radeon Cloud provides GPU processing for depth and background preparation. Neon Postgres stores project records, while Cloudflare R2 stores image assets and published gallery pieces. Figma was used for user experience planning.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was building an entire editor in 36 hours.

I wanted others to be able to create something with it this which meant I needed to add selection tools, layers, drawing, history, saving, and export. Each feature has to work with the others. As a solo developer, choosing where to spend that time was difficult.

Mobile memory was another major obstacle. Running the larger models in the browser pushed my phone and iPad beyond their limits. Radeon Cloud gave me a way to move that preparation onto GPUs and keep the editor usable on those devices.

That changed how I thought about the project. The cloud could make more demanding creative tools available on the hardware people already have.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud of making something fun and trying to innovate and inspire others to creative.

I like visuals with some crunch and imperfection. I wanted a tool that leaves room for people to make those choices themselves, and to make things I would never have thought of.

What we learned

Cloud GPUs were my favorite discovery. Being able to connect a browser editor to remote compute opened up possibilities I had ruled out after hitting mobile memory limits.

What's next for ParaEditor

I’m keeping ParaEditor open source so people can explore the rendering, take apart the effects, and build on the ideas.

There’s plenty left to polish. I want to make it easier to create and share effects and brushes, and keep exploring what depth and perspective can bring to an image editor.

The Radeon Cloud GPU service will shut down after the hackathon. I plan to keep the website online for as long as I can afford it, with desktop hardware running the models locally. Keeping the same cloud assisted iPad experience available will depend on future GPU hosting.