Menger Sponge

Watch Menger Sponge live in the browser

A slow flight down the corridors of an endless concrete Menger sponge, its halls lit by neon strips along the edges of the cubes and fading into dark fog. Now and then the whole view rolls a quarter turn.

The Menger sponge is a fractal: take a cube, cut it into 27 smaller cubes, remove the centre one and the six in the middle of each face, and repeat on what is left. Four levels of this are raymarched and the sponge is tiled through space, so the central tunnel never ends. The hall can corkscrew around its own axis and the finer cells can fold, turning straight corridors into crooked stairwells.

What it reacts to

• Bass: the corridors twist into a corkscrew, easing in and out smoothly
• Bass pulses: the finer cells fold and rotate
• Spectrum: neon strip brightness follows the bands by depth, bass near the camera and treble far down the hall
• Kick drum: a wave of light races away down the corridors; every 16 kicks the view rolls a quarter turn
• Overall loudness: sets the flight speed; in silence the hall stops

Tune

Flight speed scales the forward motion, Fold twist how strongly the bass bends the halls, and Neon sets the strip colour.

Music that suits it

Four-on-the-floor music with deep bass, such as techno or progressive house, sends steady waves down the halls and keeps the corridors twisting.

How to play it

Install Deus, play music on Spotify, YouTube Music, Yandex Music or any other tab and click the Deus icon on that tab. Then pick Menger Sponge in the WebGL presets, or press ← → on the page until it comes up.