Phosphene

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:00:28 GMT

Phosphene

Phosphene shoots a photo, writes a poem, then generates an image. The output is a triptych: the original frame, the poem, and the generated image, side by side. The image model only sees the poem and the sensors, never the photo it's reinterpreting.

I built the first version from my phone, in bed, the night the idea showed up. SSH into the laptop, tmux, a Claude Code instance running with a /goal. By morning I had an app.

Two other projects I've seen come close. Poetry Camera, by Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather, shoots a frame and prints a poem on a thermal printer, no image kept. Paragraphica, by Bjørn Karmann, drops the lens and builds a picture out of location, weather, and time.

Each of those picks one direction. Phosphene does the whole loop and keeps all three pieces: the frame, the poem it compresses to, and the image a model dreams back out from that poem and the sensors. I built it for the drift between the first panel and the last.

That's where the name comes from. A phosphene is the light you see with your eyes shut, the optic nerve firing with nothing in front of it. The third panel is the phosphene, a place the model never saw, only read about in a poem. The first panel is what was actually there.

The capture and the poem run on-device, on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, on Apple's foundation models from WWDC 2026. There is no API for that part, where Poetry Camera and Paragraphica both reach out to one. The image is the exception: it's painted on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, which needs a connection. So with no signal Phosphene still shoots and writes the poem on the spot, then paints the image later, once service comes back. Mostly local. That's the version I want.

Right now it's not good. The poems are trite. The generated images look like stock slop. But it's fun anyway, and I'm not done with it. I might open the repo if anyone wants to build their own.

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iammatthias — #image-to-image

Phosphene

Phosphene