How Points works

Points draws a moving picture as dots, about thirty thousand of them, sixty times a second, on your own graphics card. The source can be your camera, a video file or a shared screen.

Three looks

• Stipple: dots on a loose grid that appear where the picture is bright and stay put from frame to frame, so the picture doesn’t flicker.
• Halftone: a print screen at 45 degrees whose dots grow with the tone, as in a newspaper photograph.
• Pixels: square tiles.

Each dot sits at a depth set by its tone, so turning the view shows the picture as a relief. Colours come from the palettes of Stylogeny, an atlas of graphic-design styles, or from the video itself.

What happens to what you film

Nothing leaves your device. The page is a set of static files: once it has loaded, every frame is read and drawn in your browser, and there is no server that could receive it. There are no accounts, no cookies and no analytics.

A recording or a still is made in the browser too, and saved only where you save it.

Only the person

“Only the person” hides the background. It uses Google’s MediaPipe selfie segmenter, a small model (about 250 kB) that runs in your browser and marks, for each pixel of a small copy of the frame, how likely it is to be a person. The model and its runtime are files of this site, loaded only when you turn the option on; nothing is sent to Google.

What you need

A browser with WebGL: any recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on a computer or a phone. The camera asks for your permission first. Sharing a screen works on computers only.

Built with

• three.js (MIT licence) for drawing.
• MediaPipe Tasks Vision and its selfie segmenter model (Apache 2.0 licence), by Google.
• Archivo, Inter and JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font Licence).

Points is made by Van Riel Online Services as part of the -ogeny family of design tools. Questions or ideas: info@vanriel.eu.