Appraise

I’m taking a quick breather from my other projects to drop a brand new, wildly ambitious app! Meet Appraise!!

Appraise is a gamified camera app that turns the mundane real world into a massive, globally deduplicated collectible RPG. Point your camera at everyday objects to instantly extract them from reality and add them to your personal digital catalogue with procedurally generated stats and rarities! It isn’t just a scanner; it’s a collaborative project aiming to build a global encyclopedia of everyday things, complete with a creator economy for artists who claim and illustrate the items you find (not the AI slop you find these days)!

What did I make?
Before I can turn real life into a game, I had to figure out how to make real-life objects actually look pristine and cool. This v0.0.1 Proof-of-Concept is entirely focused on building a premium visual extraction pipeline:

1. The Extraction Engine: I hooked up Google ML Kit (via Play Services) to instantly identify and extract the primary object from a live CameraX preview. I also had to made the pipeline to support modern Android 15 / 16KB memory page architectures to stop native hardware crashes on newer Pixels!
2. Strict Subject Isolation: AI models can be messy and highlight background artifacts. To fix this, I cooked up blazing-fast, custom Kotlin Flood-Fill algorithm that isolates the single largest contiguous visual mass, completely deleting stray pixels and enforcing a “one-object-only” rule.
3. Dynamic VFX Compositing: The UI isn’t just an image slapped on a background! Using GPU-accelerated BlurMaskFilter passes and SRC_IN blending, a massive neon glow visually “bleeds” through the edges of the object. It perfectly occludes real-world light reflections and imperfect AI jagged edges!

This project is my absolute first foray into something that actually requires me to handle complex backends and APIs, so it’s going to be a massive learning curve!

Repo is public, but APKs are GitHub-only for now while I build out the backend and iron out the bugs!

[BTW the attached screenshots give a quick look at the final edge-blending math!]