Kaleido-Scope is a lightweight video transformation plugin to turn live video input and video files into dynamic kaleidoscopic symmetry.
🌪️ Warp
🚀 Zoom
🪞✨ Mirror
🧪 Mix
💫 Reflect
🔃 Rotate
Warp, zoom, mirror, mix, reflect, and/or rotate your creations to turn structural ordinary scenes into repeating, extraordinary ones.
Architecture
Designed to operate flexibly within Scope’s architecture as a:
- Main Pipeline
- Pre-Processor
- Post-Processor
Inspiration
As a visionary artist, I receive artistic visions that serve as inspiration that I honor through my artistic practice.
Working mainly as a physical artist and painter, I'm constantly seeing things that move and dreaming up ways to re-imagine my art digitally.
Kaleido-Scope grew from this desire to make art that breathes digitally.
Accessibility
At the time of building Kaleido-Scope, Scope only allowed main pipelines and plugins to run together when processing AI live video pipelines locally. Unfortunately, that requires hardware beyond what my RTX 4070 can comfortably handle.
So I designed this plugin differently.
Kaleido-Scope works with live camera input and standard video files. No heavy AI pipeline required.
That means it runs locally, on modest hardware, and remains accessible to a wide range of users. Join in on the fun.
What It Does
Kaleido-Scope divides incoming video into radial segments and mirrors them around a central axis, creating continuously evolving mandala-like compositions.
It does not generate new imagery, although you can use an pipeline that does. Kaleido-scope restructures the incoming signal.
Whether the input is:
- A video file
- Camera feed
- Diffusion output
- Optical flow pipeline
- Control pipeline
- Another plugin
Kaleido-Scope transforms it into rotational symmetry in real time.
Architectural Design
Kaleido-Scope is implemented as a full Scope pipeline class and can register under multiple UsageTypes, allowing it to slot into different stages of the render flow.
Because it processes tensors directly via __call__(**kwargs) on every frame, it remains lightweight and responsive.
It operates on THWC torch tensors normalized to [0,1] and returns a properly formatted {"video": tensor} output compatible with Scope’s runtime.
Features
🌀 Adjustable Slice Count Control the number of radial segments to move from subtle symmetry to dense geometric.
🎛️ Mix Control Blend seamlessly between the original frame and the transformed kaleidoscopic output.
🔄 Real-Time Warp & Rotation Mirror, rotate, and reorient incoming video into evolving symmetry fields in real time.
🧩 Multi-Stage Pipeline Support Run Kaleido-Scope as a: • Main Pipeline • Pre-Processor • Post-Processor
🔌 Built for Scope Natively • Registered via entry points • Implements prepare() and __call__(**kwargs) • Processes THWC torch tensors in real time • Fully compatible with built-in pipelines
Future Directions
🧭 Gesture-Controlled Symmetry Use motion tracking or cursor input to steer the symmetry center point in real time — turning the effect into a playable instrument.
🌊 Optical Flow Modulation Drive slice distortion and rotational energy using motion vectors from the scene. Faster movement → more structural intensity.
🧊 Depth-Aware Parallax Symmetry Introduce depth layering so foreground and background rotate at different rates, creating dimensional kaleidoscopic space.
🎚 Symmetry Morphing Smooth transitions between radial counts and mirror modes — evolving geometry instead of hard structural jumps.
🧠 Object-Anchored Symmetry Allow detected objects to become symmetry anchors instead of defaulting to screen center.
🎨 Mask-Based Symmetry Zones Apply kaleidoscopic transformation to selected regions of the frame while preserving others.
📐 Non-Radial Geometry Modes Expand beyond radial symmetry into:
- Triangular tiling
- Hexagonal tessellation
- Recursive mirror grids
🔊 Audio-Reactive Modulation Tie slice count or rotation velocity to live audio amplitude or frequency bands.