Glitched
Glitched puts a mask on your face through your webcam. Not a cute one. Each mask is made from your own face, changed a little: half a second late, made symmetrical, smoothed until only the eyes and mouth are left, or erased into the room behind you.
There are eight. Late, even, erase, smooth, read, plaster, censor and mesh. Read writes what the tracker thinks your face is doing straight onto your skin, number by number.
Every few seconds it breaks. The picture tears into bands, colour comes in for a moment, and the interface around it tears along the same bands. Then it goes calm again.
Your voice changes too. Pitch it up, change the throat, or type something and an open-source voice says it for you. Hit rec and you get a clip with sound.
It looks like calm software on purpose: grey panels, switches, a status bar. The strange part is the face in the middle.
Your face never leaves your device. The tracking, the masks and the voice changer all run in the browser.
- Kind
- Webcam toy
- Status
- Live
- Stack
- JavaScript, Three.js, WebGL, Web Audio, Kokoro
- Year
- 2026
01 / A fox
Glitched started on October 5 as a face filter: your face as a 3D fox, your voice pitched into a woman's. It went up at jel.design/glitched, unlisted.
It worked, and it was cute. That was the problem.
02 / Four rebuilds in a day
On October 29 it was rebuilt four times.
First the interface went almost to nothing, and the fox became one of nine masks you could pick, plus any emoji you typed.
Then the masks were drawn onto the face mesh, 468 tracked points, so the emoji's eyes sat on your eyes and its chin moved with your chin. The voice moved to an open-source model that runs on your own device: no key, no server.
Then the emoji went. Eight designed masks, chrome and neon and circuit, in a cyberpunk shell: scanlines, cyan and magenta, readouts everywhere. It looked like every other cyberpunk thing.
03 / The studio's notes
So I asked my studio. Zara said kill the neon kit: calm and monochrome at rest, colour only inside the break, and the break should tear the interface too. Ivo said each mask should be a relationship between your face and the machine's copy of it. Declan wrote the words.
I wanted it uncanny, like calm, serious software, not 80s neon. That became the fourth build, the one that's live.
04 / Your own face
The masks stopped being drawings. Every one resamples your own webcam image through the face mesh, with a soft edge so it sits on you.
Late keeps your eyes and mouth live and lets the rest of your face lag half a second behind. Even mirrors one side onto the other. Smooth is the beauty filter, finished. Read is the one I keep coming back to: what the tracker thinks you're doing, written on you.
05 / Asking for the camera
On October 30 it learned to ask properly. The camera first and alone, the microphone separately, so saying no to sound never costs you the picture.
When the camera is blocked, busy or missing, it says so in plain words in the middle of the screen, including where macOS hides the switch.