May 3, 2026
One photo, infinite arguing
Show HN: Apple's Sharp Running in the Browser via ONNX Runtime Web
Apple’s one-photo 3D trick hits the browser — and the comments instantly split
TLDR: A developer got Apple’s new one-image 3D photo tool working in the browser, which is a big deal because it makes a cutting-edge demo easy to try on your own computer. Commenters were torn between “this is an amazing showcase” and “this makes up fake depth and barely works outside Chrome,” which is exactly why people cared.
A developer just pulled off a very online magic trick: taking Apple’s new single-photo 3D scene generator and making it run right in your web browser, no server trip required. In plain English, you upload one picture, it tries to turn that flat image into a 3D-ish scene, and you can even download the result. Very cool? Yes. Perfect? Oh, absolutely not — and that’s where the comments got juicy.
The author showed up sounding like a proud parent, explaining they wanted to slim down Apple’s heavier setup into something people could try locally in a browser. But the community quickly turned this into a mini courtroom drama. One camp was impressed by the sheer stunt of it all: browser-based AI tools are getting real, and some users loved the privacy angle since your image can stay on your own machine. Another commenter even said they hacked together a VR photo viewer and found the effect “transformative and mesmerising,” which is about as glowing as Hacker News gets.
Then came the reality check. One user bluntly said it didn’t work in Firefox on Linux, only Chrome, and that the results on their own photos were nowhere near the pretty demo shots. Ouch. Another dropped the thread’s biggest skeptical hot take: using just one photo means the system has to invent missing details, so of course it can turn a flat poster into a weird fake 3D object. That sparked the classic AI split: is this the future, or just a flashy hallucination machine with a really big download?
And yes, people also got a kick out of the browser drama itself — giant files, picky setup, and “works on Chrome” energy. So the vibe was clear: the demo made jaws drop, but the comments kept one eyebrow raised.
Key Points
- •The project provides a browser-based interface for generating Gaussian splats from a single uploaded image using Apple’s SHARP model.
- •Running the app requires Bun, a modern desktop browser, and enough disk space and RAM for a large ONNX sidecar file of about 2.4 GB.
- •Apple’s SHARP release uses separate licenses for code and model weights, and the model license includes research-use restrictions.
- •The SHARP browser model export typically consists of both a `.onnx` file and a `.onnx.data` file, which must be served together from the same directory.
- •The app is implemented with a React and TypeScript frontend, ONNX Runtime Web inference worker, browser-side postprocessing and PLY writing, and a Gaussian splat preview component.