Every coastline begins as a function.
Every visible landscape and structure is evaluated from equations in a fragment shader. There are no downloaded meshes, image textures, or external libraries. The nine environments are artistic constructions, not scientific or ecological simulations.
Orbit: drag to turn, wheel or pinch to approach, right-drag or Shift-drag to pan. Explore: drag to look, W/A/S/D to fly, Q/E to descend/rise, Shift to move faster. Touch or hold the on-screen arrows for movement. Flight has no collision detection; passing through a surface is allowed.
Capture world saves a PNG at the current rendering resolution with a caption. A recipe records the world, seed, sliders, light, time, and camera as JSON. Load it to restore that view. The equations panel exports the current world’s complete fragment shader and the field guide.
Some primitive fields are exact signed distances. Terrain, warped surfaces, the gyroid approximation, ellipsoids, and fractals use practical distance estimators. Ray marching has finite steps and resolution; thin structures can alias. This explorer does not export meshes. Normals and height contours are surface diagnostics, not simulated physics.
Light detail is recommended on slower devices. Balanced and Fine add soft shadows and longer ray marches. “Pause” stops world time; automatic Orbit is independent. Motion begins paused when your operating system requests reduced motion. The application never makes network requests.
Alan Schoen — triply periodic minimal surfacesMDN — the WebGL 2 rendering interface