under this topic we should hat tip to the yomens work of Michael Bach, a German vision scientist and neurophysiologist who put more than 20 years into the website [1] "Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions"
- I, Robot polygons: Looks too different from the actual game.
- Wolfenstein raycaster: wasd moves to wrong direction.
- PS1 affine warp: Shows a glitched plane.
- Utah teapot: Also wrong z index, and what is this?? This must be the worst Utah teapot ever created.
- Glenz vectors: Also wrong projection.
- Penrose tiling: Might a nitpick, but why can I drag to pan? It's not like you can zoom.
- Spaghetti vortex: This says it's from 2026, so not a retro? And the thumbnail shows UI(that I can't interact) only.
It makes me sad to see these projects...
Also the descriptions are too vague. For example, what does "GL workstation · 1993" mean? How about "Metaballs · 1995"? "IRIX · 1994"? I tried to find the original renders but I couldn't.
Something’s weird with the wireframe globe. The South Pole is at the bottom of the globe, but the North Pole is not. So the axis running between them doesn’t pass through the center of the sphere.
The long/lat globe has a bizarre projection that has incorrect perspective. Neither orthogonal nor inverse Z.
The "utah" teapot is not the utah teapot. The handle is also oriented with backfaces showing, and is disconnected from the teapot body.
The "glenzing" example is just regular alpha blending and fill whereas the original glenz effect was about mimicking alpha blend using bitwise tricks on a purposely designed 256 color palette (iirc in Second Reality).
Etc etc.
I don't understand why this stuff is supposed to be impressive when what it really represents is the inability of the person who posted it to spot and fix the errors, ranging from blatantly obvious to subtly historically inaccurate.
Calling this a "museum" is a misnomer. Museums do curation and restoration, not kitschy knock offs.
The plasma effect, for example, uses vertex shaders to calculate in the order of 8 sines per pixel, and then adds some squares and square roots.
Originally, for a plasma effect, one would calculate a sine based value only for each row and each column. For a 320x240 pixel effect, only 320+240 "complicated" calculations were necessary per frame. To combine these at the pixel level, simple adds and bit shifts were enough. This was necessary, because it was entirely impossible to do so many calculations (or even memory lookups) per pixel on old hardware.
The actual effect is nice, but it has little to do with the old demoscene effect :)
I have written many old school plasmas and that does look pretty good to me. Here's one I wrote that looks quite similar https://youtu.be/oX-cepvvQds?t=50 You don't do it once per row or column, and you don't call sine/cosine at all except at init time. You generate lookup tables for cosine, and for each pixel of a (typically mode 13h VGA) 320x200 screen you step through the tables with several counters at different rates and sum the values.
under this topic we should hat tip to the yomens work of Michael Bach, a German vision scientist and neurophysiologist who put more than 20 years into the website [1] "Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions"
[1] michaelbach.de/ot
It doesn't look like any human has reviewed this.
- Retro torus: wrong z index.
- Wireframe globe: Has wrong projection.
- I, Robot polygons: Looks too different from the actual game.
- Wolfenstein raycaster: wasd moves to wrong direction.
- PS1 affine warp: Shows a glitched plane.
- Utah teapot: Also wrong z index, and what is this?? This must be the worst Utah teapot ever created.
- Glenz vectors: Also wrong projection.
- Penrose tiling: Might a nitpick, but why can I drag to pan? It's not like you can zoom.
- Spaghetti vortex: This says it's from 2026, so not a retro? And the thumbnail shows UI(that I can't interact) only.
It makes me sad to see these projects...
Also the descriptions are too vague. For example, what does "GL workstation · 1993" mean? How about "Metaballs · 1995"? "IRIX · 1994"? I tried to find the original renders but I couldn't.
Something’s weird with the wireframe globe. The South Pole is at the bottom of the globe, but the North Pole is not. So the axis running between them doesn’t pass through the center of the sphere.
Seems like vibe coded slop?
The long/lat globe has a bizarre projection that has incorrect perspective. Neither orthogonal nor inverse Z.
The "utah" teapot is not the utah teapot. The handle is also oriented with backfaces showing, and is disconnected from the teapot body.
The "glenzing" example is just regular alpha blending and fill whereas the original glenz effect was about mimicking alpha blend using bitwise tricks on a purposely designed 256 color palette (iirc in Second Reality).
Etc etc.
I don't understand why this stuff is supposed to be impressive when what it really represents is the inability of the person who posted it to spot and fix the errors, ranging from blatantly obvious to subtly historically inaccurate.
Calling this a "museum" is a misnomer. Museums do curation and restoration, not kitschy knock offs.
Yes, it’s slop and a bad imitation of the demo scene effects of the time.
The plasma effect, for example, uses vertex shaders to calculate in the order of 8 sines per pixel, and then adds some squares and square roots.
Originally, for a plasma effect, one would calculate a sine based value only for each row and each column. For a 320x240 pixel effect, only 320+240 "complicated" calculations were necessary per frame. To combine these at the pixel level, simple adds and bit shifts were enough. This was necessary, because it was entirely impossible to do so many calculations (or even memory lookups) per pixel on old hardware.
The actual effect is nice, but it has little to do with the old demoscene effect :)
I have written many old school plasmas and that does look pretty good to me. Here's one I wrote that looks quite similar https://youtu.be/oX-cepvvQds?t=50 You don't do it once per row or column, and you don't call sine/cosine at all except at init time. You generate lookup tables for cosine, and for each pixel of a (typically mode 13h VGA) 320x200 screen you step through the tables with several counters at different rates and sum the values.
Here's someone else writing one that also uses that technique https://youtu.be/X6BpW2N_Sf0
There is an even more oldschool version which was done on XT/286 class machines which was just palette cycling, which didn't look quite as dynamic.
Sigh
Is there a trick to get them moving? They're just static on my firefox and chromium.
Do you have "prefers reduced motion" on?
That did the trick. Thanks!
They move on my Firefox mobile
copy pasteable single file demos. call out ASCII torus, Amiga Boing, Wolfenstein, palette fire (~27 WebGL 1 / Canvas 2D experiments).
slop