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explainpls

Built at Zero to Agent: Vercel x Deepmind Hackathon SF · Mar 21, 2026 · San Francisco, CA

explainpls — Demo video

explainpls turns one photo of any physical object into an interactive learning world — not a text answer, not a quiz, not a flashcard deck. You snap something confusing, and the app produces an animated exploded-view diagram with tappable hotspots, mode-switching between subsystems, a live what-if experiment, and a grounded follow-up chat that stays anchored to the specific object you uploaded. curiosity about how things work is universal, but every existing AI tool gives you a paragraph. A paragraph doesn't let you poke at the mechanism. We built the thing that should have existed — a mini lab you can open in 10 seconds from a phone. The core architecture is: Gemini analyzes the photo and returns a structured LearningWorld contract (hotspots, mechanism steps, exploded scene layers, signal-flow modes, overlay paths). The frontend owns all animation, sliders, and visual state — the model never authors UI. That separation is what makes the result feel like a product rather than a hallucinated response.

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