Homecom — 45 interactive 3D and 4D toys with sound

Shapes you can hear. 45 interactive scenes in your browser: a real black hole, a quantum particle fired through two slits, galaxies colliding, rain carving canyons, forty thousand starlings, a 4D tesseract you can slice, a loop whose tune lives in the link. No install, no account. Record clips and keep them.

The scenes

  1. Nebula — Tap to morph into the next shape. Press and hold to pull everything into your finger. Move to stir. The hum follows your hand.
  2. Tesseract — This is the 3D shadow of a 4D cube, the way a square is the shadow of a cube. Drag to turn it through the fourth dimension. Each corner sings its distance along W: the chord is what 4D rotation sounds like. Tap to strum.
  3. Chimes — A glass sphere full of bells. Tap to drop one where you touch; swipe to throw it. Drag to orbit. Every collision rings a note from the pentatonic scale, panned to where it happened.
  4. Loop — A 16-step sequencer you can touch: eight notes on top, kick, snare and hat below. Tap a cube to turn it on; drag to paint. Your whole tune lives in the link, so copy it and send it. Press R for a random one.
  5. Pond — Still water that listens. Tap to drop a note in; left is low, right is high. Drag for a glissando. Rings interfere where they meet.
  6. Fireworks — Tap anywhere to launch a shell; higher taps fly higher. Hold for a barrage. Each burst is a chord and a thump, panned to where it explodes.
  7. Harp — Fifteen strings across two and a half octaves. Sweep across them to strum, tap one to pluck. Faster sweeps play brighter. Every note is a real plucked string, synthesised the instant you touch it.
  8. Voice — Sound made visible: a ring of 96 bars for the spectrum and a core that breathes with the bass. It shows whatever is playing. Allow the microphone to see your own voice. Drag to orbit.
  9. Message — Type anything. The letters become a cloud of light, and every letter is a note, so your words have a tune. Copy the link: whoever opens it sees and hears your message. Tap to replay, hold to pull it apart.
  10. Chromesthesia — A wall of 768 cubes shows what your camera sees, and nine regions of it sing: hue is the note, saturation is the volume, brightness lifts the octave. Point it at your shirt, a sunset, a plant. Without a camera it hums to demo colours.
  11. Orbits — Spacetime as a sheet. Tap near a sun to put a planet in orbit; drag to throw one; hold still to grow a new sun. Every planet hums, and you hear its Doppler shift as it swings toward you and away.
  12. Cymatics — A metal plate, a bow, and sand. The grains flee the parts that vibrate and settle on the lines that stay still. Slide the frequency and watch nine thousand grains re-organise into the pattern you hear. Tap the plate to shake it, drag to orbit.
  13. Pendulum Wave — Fifteen pendulums, each a little shorter than the last, released together. They drift out of step into travelling waves, then chaos, then back into one line after exactly a minute. Each one chimes as it passes the bottom. Tap to release them again, drag to orbit.
  14. Harmonograph — A musical interval drawn in space: the two pitches of a perfect fifth are in the ratio 3:2, and this curve is 3:2 too. Consonant intervals close into simple knots; a tritone never settles. Drag to orbit, slide Detune a few cents and hear the beating as the figure starts to precess.
  15. Black Hole — Every pixel is a ray of light traced backwards along a real Schwarzschild geodesic, so the stars behind the hole bend into an Einstein ring and the accretion disk wraps over the top. Drag to orbit, scroll to approach. The hum is the disk; it redshifts as you fall.
  16. Fluid — Real smoke, solved on your graphics card sixty times a second: the Navier–Stokes equations on a grid of a quarter-million cells. Drag to stir it. Every swirl you make is a wind you can hear, and the sound follows the vorticity.
  17. Gyro — Tilt your phone and the whole maze tilts with it: the marble rolls on real device-motion data, and its speed is a tone that rises as it runs. Reach the glowing exit. On a computer, move the mouse to tilt.
  18. Timewarp — Time is the fourth axis, so this scene slices it: every row of the picture comes from a different moment, the top is now and the bottom is two seconds ago. Wave your hand and watch it smear through time. Tap to change how time is cut. Works with your camera or the demo.
  19. Million — One million particles, every one of them simulated on your graphics card sixty times a second, pulled by the suns you place. Tap to add a sun, drag to move the last one, hold to let them fall in. Their density is the sound.
  20. Reaction — Two chemicals, one eating the other, spreading at different speeds. That is all it takes for coral, cells and worms to grow, the same equations that pattern a leopard. Paint to seed it, change the pattern, and listen: the sound thickens as the pattern fills.
  21. Chaos — A thousand double pendulums released from the same place, each one a millionth of a degree apart. For a few seconds they move as one, then the tiny differences take over and they fill the whole sky. Physics is exact; prediction is not. Tap to release again.
  22. Fractal — The Mandelbulb: a shape with infinite detail, found by raising a point to a power in three dimensions and asking whether it escapes. Every pixel marches its own ray into it. Drag to turn, scroll to dive, slide Power and watch it grow new continents.
  23. Aurora — Curtains of light marched through a volume of moving noise, the way the real thing hangs a hundred kilometres up. Drag to push the solar wind, raise the Storm, or call a flare. With a song playing, the sky breathes with it.
  24. Ferrofluid — A pool of liquid full of iron, the stuff that makes spikes under a magnet. Your finger is the magnet: hold and the surface climbs into a lattice of needles, drag and they follow. The field is a hum you can feel.
  25. Tesla — A plasma globe. Filaments of charge wander the glass until you touch it, then they all reach for your finger. Each one is a fresh bolt every few milliseconds, and you hear the crackle. Drag around the sphere.
  26. Murmuration — Forty thousand starlings at dusk, every bird deciding for itself from the birds around it, all on your graphics card. Hold anywhere and you are the hawk: the flock tears open and reforms. The rush of wings is the sound.
  27. Physarum — A slime mould: a quarter of a million blind cells, each one smelling the trail the others leave and laying more. Out of nothing, it builds a transport network. Hold to put food down and watch it reroute. The hum is the network thickening.
  28. Lenia — Life, but continuous: no cells, no on and off, just a field that grows where it likes its neighbourhood. Tap to set a creature down. It swims. Slide Mutate and watch the species change or die. Every creature is a voice in the chord.
  29. Quantum — The Schrödinger equation, solved on your graphics card as you watch. Flick to fire a particle (a wave packet) at the wall: it goes through both slits at once and interferes with itself. Colour is its phase. The detector on the right sings where it lands.
  30. Galaxy — Every star pulls on every other star, six thousand of them, all pairs, every frame, on the GPU. Two galaxies are falling together. Flick to throw a third one in. Each galaxy is a voice: it rises as it falls in.
  31. Erosion — A mountain range and a million years of rain, computed on your graphics card: water flows downhill, picks up rock, cuts canyons, drops it in the valleys. Hold to park a storm cloud anywhere. The rivers are the rumble; the rain is the hiss.
  32. Pathtracer — This is not shading, it is light itself: every frame, one random photon path per pixel bounces round the room, and the picture slowly stops being noise. Listen: the hiss becomes a note as the image converges. Drag the glass sphere and it all starts again.
  33. Bubbles — Soap bubbles with the real physics of their colour: light bouncing off both faces of a film thinner than a wavelength, draining as it ages. Hold to blow one, tap a bubble to pop it, drag for a breeze. Each pop has a pitch of its own.
  34. Jelly — Soft bodies: each one is a lattice of masses and springs that remembers its shape. Tap one to poke it, drag to grab and stretch it, tap empty floor to drop another. Every landing squelches at its own pitch.
  35. Chirp — Two black holes falling into each other. The grid is spacetime; the ripples are gravitational waves, and the note you hear is the real chirp (Einstein's equations, slowed down for your ears). Heavier pairs sing lower. Tap to start again.
  36. Sandbox — Sand, water, oil, fire and plants, each cell deciding with its neighbours sixty times a second on the graphics card. Draw with the chosen element: pour water on sand, float oil, set it alight, grow a garden. The hiss is how much is moving.
  37. Cloth — A flag of six thousand knots, each one pulled by its neighbours and the wind, solved on your graphics card. Drag to push it with your hand. Turn on the scissors and drag to cut it. The wind is the sound, and so is the rip.
  38. Attractor — Two hundred thousand points following the same three equations, never repeating, never leaving. This is chaos with a shape. Drag to turn it. The sound is the equations themselves, integrated forty-eight thousand times a second.
  39. Epicycles — Any closed curve is a sum of circles turning at whole-number speeds: Fourier's theorem, drawn. Draw a shape with your finger and watch the circles redraw it, then hear it: every circle is a harmonic of the same note. Fewer circles, rougher copy.
  40. Orbital — The hydrogen atom, computed from Schrödinger's equation: every dot is a place the electron is likely to be, blue where the wave is positive, pink where it is negative. Change n, l and m and the cloud reshapes. Each jump between levels plays the photon it would emit, slowed to a note.
  41. Prism — White light into glass. Each wavelength bends by its own amount (Cauchy's law, turned up so you can see it), so the beam opens into a spectrum on the screen. Drag to turn the prism, add a second one to fold the rainbow back into white. Every colour that lands on the screen is a note of a chord.
  42. Cathedral — A room that computes its own echo: thousands of sound rays bounce off its walls to build the impulse response, and that response becomes a real reverb. Tap to clap where your finger is. Slide the room from a closet to a cathedral and hear it ring. The glowing paths are the sound.
  43. Deep — The Mandelbrot set, zooming forever. Past a trillionth, ordinary computer numbers run out of digits; this page keeps going with 192-bit arithmetic for one reference point and lets the graphics card follow every other pixel as a small difference from it. Tap to steer. The note rises with the depth.
  44. Critter — Nobody animated this creature. Each leg solves for where its foot must go and steps when the body has walked too far from it, and the body sways with the rhythm. Drag anywhere and it follows you. Its footsteps are the beat.
  45. Planet — A world that did not exist a second ago: continents from noise, and a sky computed the way a real sky is, sunlight scattering off air (blue by day, red at the edges). Drag to turn it and watch the sun set and rise. The wind is the sound; it drops at night.

Made by Homecom. Runs entirely in your browser with WebGL and Web Audio. Camera and microphone never leave the device.

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