The Kaleidoscope was the first program I shipped on this site, and it set the template for everything after it: a real app, running live, built to a production standard — then iterated in the open until it earned its place.
Three ways of folding light
The piece renders three optical designs, each a different way of breaking an image into repeating facets:
- Classic prism — the familiar triangular fold, mirrored and tiled into a rosette.
- Rose window — a circular gothic fold, like light through cathedral glass.
- Infinity well — a circular inversion that drops the image down eight mirrored chambers.
Over the facets goes a dye-film palette: translucent tints that dye the pieces without flattening them, the way gel filters dye stage light. And underneath it all, an idle animation that never quite sits still — a slow swell, a counter-rotation, a breathing zoom. That loop got its shape from review: the first version wasn’t interesting enough, so it gained layers until it was apparent but never busy. Apparent but never busy is the whole target, really.
Lens mode: your world as the object chamber
The big evolution was lens mode. A traditional kaleidoscope has an object chamber — the little tube of beads and glass at the end. Ours was missing one, so I gave it yours: the live camera feed (front or rear), or an image from your photo roll, becomes the chamber. It isn’t overlaid on the design — it’s sampled through each style’s fold coordinates, broken up, mirrored, and refracted into the repeating facets. Your living room becomes the beads.
Getting there meant a real camera pipeline: rear camera starting from the head-up toggle’s user gesture, front/rear flip, a photo-roll input, chamber zoom, recenter, and touch steering — plus the discipline to stop every camera track the moment lens mode turns off, the page hides, or the tab loses visibility. A camera that keeps running after you leave is a bug, full stop.
Process notes
A few things this project taught me that I now treat as standing rules:
- First-class integration, no iframes. The Kaleidoscope is a direct page on this site, not an embedded frame. We have root control here; workarounds are more trouble than they’re worth.
- Only ship working features. A system-audio capture option that couldn’t work reliably on macOS got removed, not shipped with an apology. A button that can’t deliver is worse than no button.
- Preview link, then device gate. Every round went to a preview URL first, then to Ben’s iPhone 16 Pro Max — the final fidelity gate. Synthetic harnesses catch regressions; only his eyes catch taste.