Particle FX Lab — video to depth to 3D glyph cloud

Depth Anything V2 small runs in the browser through transformers.js on WebGPU, per frame, with temporal smoothing, a depth curve, near and far culling, and an edge pin that holds the frame border flat. For higher quality, depth is baked offline with Depth Anything 3 and loaded as a depth video. Around 100,000 particles sit in four depth slices, each a glyph, a dot or a voxel, over an optional dimmed plate of the source that fills the gaps between slices. Twelve styles, ASCII to Dissolve, are parameter sets on one pipeline. Bass drives splash, depth pump, bloom and zoom; highs drive chroma and glitch; mids stay unmapped so the vocal never moves the picture. The camera orbits, pans and dollies, and the front view projects exactly as the flat video. It runs on archival single-camera footage with no 3D source. A person filmed on one phone can be walked around.

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Particle FX Lab before the transition, the source video untouched

The same frame as matrix rain in four depth slices