An endless, ray-marched descent through a living field grown from two numbers in balance.
One HTML file. Zero dependencies. No network calls.
A volumetric field built from π (the circle) and φ (the golden ratio) held at a
quiet equilibrium: the radius where a circle's area is exactly golden (πr² = φ) and the
exponent that turns golden growth into circles (φ^d* = π).
Every frame is ray-marched in a fragment shader. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to ride the elevator, and keep going - the zoom is genuinely unbounded in both directions, and no two depths look alike.
 |
 |
| Fractal detail A Koch/Sierpinski kaleidoscopic fold nests structure inside structure. Fold depth follows the zoom ratio, so diving unpacks fresh octaves. |
The core An oblate spheroid with a catenoid throat. Light bends around it, and color pours in at one pole and out of the other. |
 |
 |
| Solar Mandala One of eighteen presets, each a different corner of the parameter space. |
Void Singularity Thin-film iridescence rides on top of the coherence palette. |
 |
 |
| Rainbow Cascade Color is not painted on - it is read out of the field's own phase coherence. |
Polar flow Looking up the axis, into the open throat of the core. |
Kuramoto color. At every point the shader seeds five oscillators from the field itself - its rotation angle, curvature (π), growth (φ), wave (ψ) and radial slice. Local density sets the coupling; a few relaxation steps let them try to synchronise. Where they lock, the region collapses onto one pure hue; where they cannot, the spectrum splays apart. Emergent shells, cells and filaments therefore sort themselves into color.
Unbounded zoom. Detail finer than a pixel is filtered away analytically rather than
forbidden. Every wave is band-limited against the ray footprint, the fold sheds octaves via a
level-of-detail term, and radial quantities live in log(r) - where a change of scale is only
a phase shift. That is what lets the climb run without the image breaking up.
The core. A catenoid throat bored along the polar axis of an oblate spheroid: the throat
radius is zero at the midplane and flares toward each pole, so the two polar funnels meet at a
single point at the absolute centre. Rays are integrated as curved paths, deflected by GM/r²,
so light bends around the horizon and piles the field into a bright rim.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Drag | Orbit, with momentum |
| Two-finger drag / shift+drag | Pan, damped by depth for precision |
| Scroll / pinch | Ride the elevator |
| Double-tap | Auto-spin |
? |
Full keyboard map |
i |
First principles and credits |
M |
Control deck |
Q |
Cycle render quality |
1-9 |
Load a preset |
Ray marching is fragment-bound, so cost scales with pixels × march steps. An adaptive quality engine watches the frame rate and retunes both. Handhelds that look thermally limited open a notch lower and will not climb to HIGH, and a SAVER tier is available for phones and long sessions - roughly 17× less fragment work than HIGH.
- PNG snapshot, with the wordmark burned in and named for where it was taken:
space-time-elevator_drifting-atrium_L7.1_th147_phm31.png - WebM/MP4 capture
- Share links encoding the exact parameters, camera, pan and depth
- Marks - named bookmarks, stored on the device
No build step, no dependencies:
git clone https://github.com/scalabled/spacetime-elevator.git
cd spacetime-elevator
python3 -m http.server 8000
# open http://localhost:8000/spacetime-elevator.htmlOpening the file directly with file:// also works in most browsers.
Requires WebGL. Everything persists in localStorage; nothing leaves the device.
Created by @mrinreality1.
Licensed under the MIT License.