Written by
Helena Dang
I made a photobooth you control with your hands. You make a finger gun, bend your index finger, and the camera takes your photo. It’s called Say Helenaa, because “say cheese” was already taken.
Why a camera
I wanted to build something that felt like a toy. Most of my work is dashboards and forms, which I love, but nobody has ever giggled at a settings page.
From Figma to code
I designed it in Figma first. Then I tried to make it interactive with Figma Make, which kept “improving” my design into something else. So I built it myself with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The hand tracking runs right in your browser. No uploads, no servers looking at your face.
The finger gun problem
Detecting a hand is easy. Knowing when someone means to take a photo is not.
My first version fired the moment you bent your finger, so every photo was of a person mid-gesture with a very serious face. Now the gesture starts a 3 second countdown, so you have time to fix your hair. You also hear a little shutter sound and see a white flash, because a camera without a flash is just a webcam.
It also had to not fire when you scratch your nose. That took longer than I want to admit.
The camera that travels
After your third photo, the camera flips around in 3D, shrinks, and glides to its spot in the gallery. It’s the same camera the whole time. Tiny detail, but it makes the whole thing feel like one object instead of two pages.
Stickers in a cat bowl palette
The gallery became a little play space. Your photos print out one by one with a warm retro filter. You can drag them, tilt them and put stickers on them. The stickers use colors from my cat’s food bowl. The cursor is a cat paw. I regret nothing.
What I learned
Show people what the computer sees. The how-to screen draws the hand tracking live on your camera, and suddenly everyone gets the gesture in seconds.
Always have a backup. Space and clicking still work, because bad lighting shouldn’t ruin a toy.
And build the silly thing. It taught me more about interaction design than any serious project this year.
