SpaceTravel

Watch SpaceTravel live in the browser

Glowing clouds of a fractal nebula hang in front of a field of fine stars, in layers that drift slowly past one another. The nebula's shape and colour come from the lowest part of the spectrum, so its filaments thicken, warm and fade as the bass and low mids change.

The clouds are built on Kali's "very simple formula for fractal patterns", shared on Fractal Forums: a point is repeatedly folded by absolute value and divided by its squared length, and the shells it passes through are gathered as light. Three layers of this field with different offsets and iteration counts are mixed, with two layers of hashed stars behind them.

What it reacts to

• Deepest bass: strengthens the main cloud and its red tones
• Upper bass and low mids: bring in green and blue and the third, finer cloud layer
• Low mids: brighten the whole frame, most of all toward the edges
• Silence: the nebula fades away and only the stars remain; mids and treble are not used

Music that suits it

Music with a rich, changing low end, such as ambient with deep drones, dub or downtempo, keeps the nebula full and shifting.

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 SpaceTravel in the WebGL presets, or press ← → on the page until it comes up.