Bubblemania

This small project is several things:

1. First and foremost, it's a little, light "visual ASMR" treat to bring some positivity into your day - some "Maluma" softness to contrast the more common "Takete" of contemporary generative art aesthetics[1].

2. A small gift to celebrate the fledgling generative art/design community on Mastodon: 20 of the 128 tokens are given to some of the people in that slowly growing community, with the remainder given as Thank You (and smoke signal/sign of life) to some of my existing collectors, randomly chosen via lottery script[2].

3. For those so inclined, and with a bit of hand-holding, ChatGPT explains the true conceptual depths of this project much better than I ever could:

"The bubbles in this generative art piece serve as a reflection of the human experience, reminding us of our own impermanence and the ephemeral nature of all things. The piece invites us to contemplate the fundamental questions of human existence and speaks to our innate curiosity and desire to understand the world around us.

Through the convergence of science and art, this piece reveals the infinite complexity and unpredictability of the world while also hinting at the underlying order that exists within the chaos of the universe. It reminds us that even in the midst of uncertainty, there is beauty and order to be found, and that it is through the pursuit of knowledge and understanding that we can find meaning and purpose in our lives."

Isn't that lovely & who can argue with that?! :)

4. I often revisit projects/ideas after many years, mainly to re-examine them with new eyes/knowledge/tools and/or to get answers/verification which I couldn't get earlier. This is one of these instances. So for the more rational-minded, this is a TypeScript/GLSL (WebGL) version of an older Clojure/Houdini project (from 2016) to generate a Voronoi via the simulation of intersecting sphere meshes (aka foam bubbles). In this new version the sim & deformations are done in realtime (~4M vertices, mainly via vertex shader). Also added some basic physics and procedural textures to create more of a quirky character (hopefully complemented by the different color themes and other params).

Made with ❤️ and https://thi.ng/umbrella!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
[2] https://gist.github.com/postspectacular/3d970e02570b7dfd32d03d43e1e7e3e0

Hotkeys:

SPACE : pause/play
X : export current frame as PNG

Ultra-widescreen support:

The piece should be adaptive to aspect ratios from 1:3 (portrait) to 4:1 (landscape).