Five hundred bees, one cursor.
500 instanced sprites, simulated on the CPU. The cursor acts as a flower: bees are pulled in from a wide radius, then drift into a tangential orbit when they get close — a hover dance instead of a collision. A click sends an amber shockwave that pushes the swarm outward; the field reforms within seconds.
WebGL · 500 sprites · CPU simulation · Newtonian forces
Move the mouse · click for a shockwave
Sprite: hand-drawn · Peter Schmidlin
What I want to test here
- — Cursor as flower, not as pointer — attraction over command
- — Outer pull plus tangential orbit reads as life, not as physics
- — Performance ceiling: at what count does the swarm break on mobile?
- — Transfer to Astrophotal star fields or Descienced cards
A network that flees from light.
16'384 GPU agents drop chemoattractant, follow the strongest local gradient and weave a living network — Jones (2010) on Physarum polycephalum, the slime mould that famously redrew the Tokyo metro map. Here the cursor is light: agents nearby steer away. A click sends a scattering pulse — the network breaks open and finds a new shape.
WebGL · GPU agents · half-float ping-pong textures · diffuse + decay
Move the mouse · click to scatter the network
After Jones 2010 · Tero et al. 2010 · Sage Jenson
What I want to test here
- — Cursor as repulsion, not attraction — a different mental model
- — Network re-formation as a metaphor for resilience
- — GPU compute via texture ping-pong: how far does WebGL1 carry us?
- — Candidate background for Descienced category transitions