Nothing on Eight

Nothing on Eight

K Labs · Floor 08 · Needs JavaScript and WebGL2

This one needs WebGL. It is a renderer rather than a document — there is no article underneath it standing in for the thing, so here is what you are missing.

It is a black hole, and every pixel of it is a light ray traced backwards through curved spacetime until it either falls in, hits the glowing disk of gas, or escapes to the sky. Nothing in the image is drawn. That matters, because it means three things show up that were never put there on purpose:

• The band over the top. That is the far side of the disk — the part behind the hole — bent up and over into view.
• The band underneath. Same disk, same far side, bent the other way.
• The hairline ring. Light that wound almost a full lap around the hole before it got out.

You can orbit it, and you can fall towards it. Two clocks in the corner start together and drift apart as you get closer, because they have to: down there a second is shorter.

Your cursor is in the well too. Take it anywhere near the shadow and it stops being yours — it picks up weight, falls into orbit, stretches along the line to the hole and goes in. Only how fast you actually move your hand can get it back, and it takes a real flick. The HUD is safe ground, Escape switches it off, and there is a button for it.

There is also a switch marked as filmed. Interstellar's black hole deliberately left out the Doppler beaming and the gravitational redshift — done properly, one edge of the disk goes blinding and the other nearly vanishes, which would have read to audiences as a mistake. Flipping the switch puts it back.

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