Iridia · a materials study
Everything below this line is rendered live on your GPU, in one fragment shader. No video, no photographs. Scroll to move the alloy through its states.
State 02 / 04
Resonant
Feed it a photon and it answers in colour. The lattice stores light as a standing wave, then releases it a hue at a time.
State 03 / 04
Bloom
Above the resonance threshold the surface unbinds. It blooms into folded lobes that each carry a different slice of the spectrum.
State 04 / 04
Settle
Withdraw the field and it remembers its rest. The alloy folds back to a single sphere, a shade deeper than before.
The thesis
We stopped asking what a metal is made of, and started askingwhat it does with light.Iridia does not have a colour. It has a relationship with the light in the room.
Measured properties
The spectral sheet
Bench figures from the resonance chamber. Every number here is invented for this study, but they are the numbers a material like this would need.
0
Refractive response
Index at the resonance peak. Light bends into the lattice before it reflects.
0 nm
Spectral ceiling
Emission spans 380 to 740 nm. The full visible band, released one wavelength at a time.
0 ms
Relaxation time
How long the surface holds a state before folding back toward rest.
0 %
Reflectivity
Near-total specular return. What you see is almost entirely its environment, re-coloured.
0
Lattice memory
Discrete stored states. The alloy remembers the last twelve fields it met.
0 g/cm³
Density
Light for a metal. It floats an idea heavier than its mass.
How the image is made
Nothing here is a picture
The alloy above is not filmed or photographed. It is computed, thirty times a second, on your own hardware. Here is the whole trick.
Read the maker's guide- 01
Signed distance field
The form is three spheres blended with a smooth-minimum, rippled by a low-frequency wave. No mesh, no vertices, just a distance function marched per pixel.
- 02
Thin-film iridescence
Colour is not painted on. A Fresnel term drives a cosine spectrum, so the hue you see depends on the angle between your eye and the surface, exactly as it would on a soap film.
- 03
One shader, live
A single WebGL fragment program runs the whole scene at your screen refresh. Scroll drives the morph; your cursor tilts the camera. It weighs a few kilobytes.
Access
Request the spectral sheet
Iridia is a fictional material and a real demonstration. If you want a site that renders its own hero live on the GPU, this is what that looks like.