Show HN: Apple's Sharp Running in the Browser via ONNX Runtime Web

Did not work in Firefox on Linux, but it runs on Chrome.

Have to admit, I dont get it. I tried it with 3 landscape photos I have and the results were nowhere close to the results in the demo, but that just speaks to the model.

Regardless, its very cool as a browser tech showcase.

Hi HN, author here. SHARP is Apple's recent single-image 3D Gaussian splatting model (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685). Their reference code is PyTorch + a pretty heavy pipeline; I wanted to see if it could run in a browser with no server hop, so I exported the predictor to ONNX and ran it via onnxruntime-web with the WebGPU EP.

What works: drop in an image, get a .ply you can download or preview live, all on your machine — your image never leaves the tab. The model is large (~2.4 GB sidecar) so first load is slow on a cold cache, but inference itself is a few seconds on a recent Mac.

Caveats: SHARP's released weights are research-use only (Apple's model license, not the code's). I host the exported ONNX on R2 so thedemo "just works", but you can also export your own from the upstream Apple repo and upload locally.

Happy to talk about it in the comments :)

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