A Mirror That Never Shows Your Face

Most camera experiences ask you to perform for the lens. Relief uses the camera for something quieter: a visual field that moves with you, then lets the image disappear.

The first public POC is open now. Give it a minute, move, soften, look away, come back. The field answers without putting a score, diagnosis or synthetic face on screen.

The reflection is felt, not filmed

Relief reads facial landmarks and movement in the browser. Those signals stretch a procedural mesh, disturb its flow and change how quickly the scene opens. As movement settles, fragmentation gives way to orbit, coherence, release and a blue clearing.

There is no normal camera preview. Your face appears as pressure, structure and motion inside the same full-screen field. It can feel recognisable without becoming a portrait.

That distinction protects the experience from two common failures. A literal selfie feed makes people self-conscious. A detached generative animation becomes wallpaper. Relief stays connected to the person in front of it while leaving room to stop watching yourself.

Privacy is part of the visual language

The camera frames stay in memory on the device. They are not uploaded or saved. The renderer receives bounded signals such as facial movement, stability and topology—not an image it can reproduce later.

If camera access is unavailable, the reset still runs. The response is less personal, and the interface says so plainly. Missing input is a limit of the experience, never a judgment about the person using it.

How the POC works

MediaPipe runs locally to produce face landmarks and blendshape signals. A TypeScript adapter normalises those readings before they reach a WebGL2 feedback renderer. The renderer keeps one persistent GPU field alive across the whole session, so facial topology, movement, colour and depth reshape one world instead of stacking separate effects. Raw camera frames, audio samples and motion samples are never persisted or transmitted.

A POC should ask a sharp question

This version is not a finished wellbeing claim. It is testing whether a browser can create immediate relief through private, visible cause and effect: I move, it moves; I settle, it opens. Thresholds, pacing and visual intensity still need real people in front of real cameras.

That is the useful edge of the web here. The browser already has the graphics, sensing and audio primitives for intimate experiences. The harder work is combining them without turning a person into content or a metric.

Try Relief and tell us where the mirror feels alive—and where the connection breaks. That feedback is what turns this POC into an experience worth keeping.