Real-time · WebGL2 · zero dependencies

Morphogen

A system that grows itself. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand particles, a chemistry simulation running on your graphics card, and a body that notices when you move. Nothing here was downloaded. It is all being computed, right now, in this tab.

Begin the sequence

Void

Before pattern, there is only noise.

A uniform field is the most boring thing in the universe and the most unstable. Every point identical to every other, every direction the same as the last. It looks like nothing is happening. In fact it is the one state from which anything can happen.

What you are looking at is a velocity field built from curl noise — a divergence-free flow described by Bridson and colleagues in 2007 — which means the particles swirl but never pile up. Fluid-like motion, no fluid solver. The cheapest possible lie, and a beautiful one.

Move your pointer. The field already knows.

Genesis

Instability is the first act of creation.

In 1952 Alan Turing published The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, arguing that a perfectly even mixture of two chemicals could, all by itself, fall into spots and stripes. No blueprint, no architect. Just diffusion at two different speeds and a reaction that feeds on itself.

He called the chemicals morphogens — form-makers. The paper is the reason a leopard has spots and your fingers arrived in the right number. It was published two years before he died, and largely ignored for a decade.

Here, the particles are pulled from dispersion into a shell. Symmetry breaking, rendered as attraction.

Pattern

Two chemicals. Four numbers. Every pattern in biology.

The skin of the organism is a live Gray–Scott reaction–diffusion system, 512 × 512 cells, stepped several times per frame on the GPU. Chemical A is fed in; chemical B eats it and reproduces; both drain away. That is the entire ruleset.

Change the feed rate by a few thousandths and coral becomes fingerprints, fingerprints become mitosis, mitosis becomes a slow boil that never settles. John Pearson catalogued the zoo of them in Science in 1993 and the family is still not fully mapped.

Drag across the organism to inject chemical B and watch the pattern eat your handwriting.

Awareness

It knows where you are.

Forty filaments, sixteen nodes each, integrated with the method Loup Verlet published in 1967 for simulating argon atoms and which now holds up most of the cloth in most of the games you have played. Position and previous position; the difference is the velocity. Constraints are solved by relaxation, four passes a frame.

They reach for your cursor. Hold the button down and the organism charges, then releases a pressure wave through the particle field. Stop moving entirely and, after a few seconds, it comes looking for you.

Swarm

Intelligence with nobody in charge.

Craig Reynolds showed in 1987 that flocking needs only three local rules and no leader at all. The swarm here is given something to want: the particles are handed target coordinates sampled from rasterised letterforms and they self-assemble into language, then forget it again.

Every position is a texel in a floating-point texture. The simulation never touches the CPU — positions and velocities are written to one pair of buffers, read from the other, and swapped. The word you are about to read is being drawn by a quarter of a million independent agents that cannot see each other.

Dissolution

Everything that organises, disperses.

The attraction term goes to zero. What is left is the noise field it was born from, and the particles remember nothing. The organism does not die so much as stop insisting.

Thank you for looking at it. It has been watching you the whole way down.

What is actually running

Renderer: Hand-written WebGL2. No three.js, no engine, no build step, no packages.
Particles: Up to 262,144 agents in ping-ponged RGBA32F textures, advected by curl noise and morph targets held in a texture array.
Chemistry: Gray–Scott reaction–diffusion, 512², multi-stepped per frame, feeding the organism's displacement and emissive veins.
Body: Sphere-traced signed distance field with smooth-minimum metaballs, domain warping and a thin-film iridescent shade.
Filaments: CPU Verlet solver, GPU screen-space ribbon expansion.
Light: HDR float target, threshold bright-pass, six-level dual-filter bloom, ACES filmic tonemap, radial chromatic aberration, animated grain.
Sound: Entirely synthesised at runtime — drifting oscillator drone, scene-keyed pad, pentatonic bells, and a convolution reverb built from a procedurally generated impulse response. Zero audio files.
Weight: Whatever this page cost you, and nothing else.

If you would rather it stopped

Every word above is real text in the document, in reading order, with the canvas hidden from assistive technology. The site honours prefers-reduced-motion, and the toggle in the corner will calm the simulation, disable the custom cursor and remove parallax at any time. Sound is off until you ask for it. Nothing autoplays, nothing flashes.

Built as a demonstration of what the browser can do unassisted.