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Abandoned · 2026

Photography Digital Art

Turns a photograph into a living 3D data sculpture - an interactive, GPU-simulated particle cloud derived from the image's own geometry, color, and depth.

  • Python
  • WGSL
  • OpenCV
  • Pillow
  • NumPy
  • SciPy
  • pygfx
What it was

Photography Digital Art (Apollo 7) is a local-first desktop app that treats photos as datasets, not prompts. It extracts edges, color signals, and depth from a source image, projects them into a 3D point cloud, then animates that cloud with a real GPU fluid simulation. Flowing, breathing forms were inspired by Refik Anadol's data sculptures. This is a fully developed version of the idea in the image analyser project.

Python and WGSL handle the vision and physics; Claude makes the per-photo art-direction decisions. Claude's photo analysis runs in background workers, so the viewport never freezes, and it works completely offline when no API key is set.

Apollo 7 desktop app showing a photograph rendered as a 3D particle point cloud with a control panel.
The Apollo 7 app - a photo projected into a GPU particle cloud, with live extraction and layout controls.
Apollo 7 desktop app showing a denser particle simulation of a photograph.
A denser simulation pass - the point cloud breathing and dispersing under the fluid sim.
Why it didn't stick

It was a nice, fun project. I got to play with fluid dynamics parameters once again and enjoyed seeing my photos come to life as particles.

This made me realise the complexity that comes with a desktop app, like After Effects and Lightroom. Also, Refik Anadol is a huge ceiling - the ideal end goal would have been something like the cover image...

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