Continuum
A looping WebGL sculpture. A woven ring folds through itself and lands exactly where it started, every 24 seconds.
Continuum was the first thing to live at nexost.io: one full-screen page, no navigation, and a woven ring turning slowly in the dark. When the site grew into this workshop the piece moved here instead of being deleted.
How it works
The ring is not a video or a model file. The browser draws it from a formula: 176 ribbons in two families, wound around a torus in opposite directions so they cross like a weave. A vertex shader bends all of them every frame, and a couple of blur passes add the soft glow around the bright threads.
Every moving value (the twist of the braid, the bulge of the ring, the light, the camera) is a whole-number harmonic of one 24-second phase. When the cycle ends, each of them is back where it began, so the last frame is the first frame and there is no seam to hide.
Small print
- There is a pause button, and the piece starts paused for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion.
- Slow devices get a lighter mesh automatically. Where WebGL is unavailable, a static SVG rendering stands in.
- No libraries. The shaders are written by hand and the whole thing is about 19 KB of JavaScript.