Reality Filters
Reality Filters is a new iOS app that lets you paint image filters onto the world around you. Turn the world into a giant coloring book or shift the colors of objects in your room.
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What makes Reality Filters unique is that the filters persist wherever you apply them in the world. This makes it feel like you are painting the filters on to the world itself instead of just messing around with the pixels on your screen. This opens up a lot of creative filter possibilities, and also lets users of the app build very unique scenes.
The Coloring Book filter for example renders the world like a pencil drawing, with your painting filling in the colors. Meanwhile the Pleasantville filter turns everything grayscale and then lets you paint color back into the world. Pretty neat!
Coloring book reality
The app also draws on a few of my previous projects. The AR painting tech for example first debuted in VoxelizeAR. While that app is neat enough in its own right, it was always intended to mostly be a technical stepping stone for Reality Filters.
Meanwhile some of the filters themselves can be traced all the way back to I’m Only Dancing So That I Can See the Rainbow. Looking back over that now almost five year old project sent me spiraling into a mild existential crisis to be honest. Reality Filters just feels so… commercial in comparison. Don’t get me wrong: turning the world into a giant coloring book is pretty damn magical and I’m excited to continue creating new effect for Reality Filters, but it also made me wonder if focusing so much on publishing apps has limited how experimental I can be. But all that’s a matter for another time.
For now, Give Reality Filters a try and let me know what you think! It’s a free app too, so if you enjoy it be sure to leave a review to help others find it.