Beyond the Lens

Capture surreal, photorealistic pictures with your camera while exploring an abstract environment. A relaxing artgame powered by ethical AI image generation.

What is Beyond the Lens?

Beyond the Lens is a 3D, first-person, explorational photography game. You start your journey in a minimal environment surrounded by virtual nature, as you venture outward you will find more strange and surreal subjects to photograph.

The images taken of this weird world are developed by the camera in a few seconds, revealing a photoreal reflection of your composition. Discover new vistas, novel techniques, and unique ways of capturing that perfect photo.

Save, edit, and share the photos of your journey!

Wishlist on Steam! (thanks!)

Check out the old itch.io page!

How was Beyond the Lens made?

Beginning as a university assignment project in April 2022, the prompt being "sharable content", I had discovered the Nvidia GauGAN web app a few months earlier, and knew there was a way to upload custom segment maps and return them as others had built tools for Blender, After Effects, and GIMP.

It didn't take too long to get the code working to send and retrieve images from GauGAN, what took much longer was designing and environment that was both fun to explore, and when captured, returned interesting images. I think there is still a lot of room for improvement on both those fronts, and as an extra "feature" I brought an Instax SP-3 instant film printer to physical showcases of Beyond the Lens, and made a special build of the game that allowed players to print their favourite photos as a souvenir:

Unfortunately, the GauGAN web app was permanently shut down as of March 2023, making Beyond the Lens unplayable. But if you have an Nvidia RTX GPU you can try their new app Nvidia Canvas which is pretty similar!

So, what now?

I am currently exploring new techniques in machine learning and ethical AI to bring back Beyond the Lens.

Until then, feel free to wishlist on Steam!

As a bonus, here are a few side-by-side results from the early GauGAN prototype: Those trees lost their leaves for some reason.

Placing things in midair that shouldn't be always gave interesting results!

It was a struggle getting waterfalls to develop consistently.

A tiny, lone house in the middle of a desert. Never would have guessed from the image taken by the player.

Skyscrapers seemed to ignore perspective most of the time.

A lake? A tiny ocean? So weirdly realistic.

Thanks for reading!