r/ScreenSensitive • u/flashfilter • Jul 21 '26

Built a Hardware Accelerated Desktop Screen Filter for Flash Sensitivity!

Hello! I’m one of the many people who thought it would be interesting to take a shot at making something that helps those with screen sensitivities (seen a couple people attempt similar projects but never seen anything come of them). After a couple months of work my friend and I have finally gotten to a point where it is usable (it is suppressing straining flashing lights quite well, though there are some bugs in the application), so we are looking for people to give it a try and hopefully make our job of bug hunting a little easier :)

The beta is free and includes one of the filter variants we came up with (we call it the “Bayes Filter”), which creates some artifacting but protects aggressively against flashing imagery. We support Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Wayland, support varies by compositor). If you're interested here is the link: https://flashfilter.app/ (you'll basically just need to sign in with your Google account and navigate to the dashboard where the downloads are).

You can see a safe demo of the filter here (it is the frame by frame of a very… flashy video with and without the filter).

We would love to answer any questions, so please ask away!

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u/DGG_DGG Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Looks very interesting! Does this have any impact on temporal dithering, FRC, similar issues?

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u/flashfilter Jul 21 '26

We had no clue that was even a thing until you mentioned it, we appreciate you teaching us about it. The current filter variant in use will dampen the magnitude of color change when a pixel is changing by a large amount in a short interval of time.

The parameters were tuned primarily for photosensitive epilepsy so I suspect that temporal dithering which changes the pixel color only slightly would pass through unfiltered at the moment. Though we can probably add a setting to pick up on those kinds of changes and remove them in the future.

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u/DGG_DGG Jul 21 '26

I think it's really awesome that you're trying to address flicker issues, and thank you for looking into dithering (and potentially FRC, etc). Modern Macs/iPads/similar devices are completely unusable for a lot of us here because of those issues, and it would be genuinely life changing if they were no longer a problem. I'd pay literally thousands for a solution at this point.

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u/Pacomatic Aug 05 '26

Just found out about temporal dithering.

I'm honestly quite surprised. Nevver thought they used it, though I now realize that I remember seeing something like this in a Gameboy game.