StrudelVision

What happened

Saw the tunnel on this site reacting to music. Wanted more of that. Added a second shader. Then a third. Then a synth pad because it seemed reasonable at the time. Then a DJ mixer. Then TouchDesigner because the WebSocket was right there.

It runs at localhost:8888. It only runs on my laptop. Nobody asked for it.

The design direction was “Teenage Engineering meets MCM brutalist meets retro DJ bar.” The reality is more like a late night with too many browser tabs open and the fans going.

What it does (mostly)

Four visual modes:

1. Thermal fractal — Julia set, heat map, cycles through presets when the math goes bad
2. Cyber flow — domain-warped noise, neon grid, looks cooler than it sounds
3. Prismatic feedback — rainbow trails, hue matrix, the most chaotic one
4. Infinite hall — Canvas2D feedback zoom, borrowed from this site’s tunnel, not actually GLSL

Audio analysis drives all of it: spectral centroid steers color, flux drives intensity, hit accumulation gates cuts. There’s also a kinetic text engine, speech-to-text lyrics, an AI chat panel that tells Ollama to edit shader parameters in natural language, and a WebSocket that exports state to TouchDesigner.

Zero build system. Single index.html. python3 -m http.server 8888.

What doesn’t work

• Runs the laptop fans at full speed. That’s the vibe now.
• Hall mode can’t composite with the shader pipeline. It’s a separate renderer and there’s no fixing that without rewriting everything. Not rewriting everything.
• The synth pad records layers but there’s no way to delete a layer. Bug. Also kind of a feature.
• TouchDesigner is a completely different discipline and it shows. The bridge is one-way. That’s fine.
• Ollama has to be running locally for the AI chat. Most people don’t have Ollama running locally.
• CSS animation is genuinely harder than writing WebGL shaders, which says something about CSS.

Nobody else uses this. That’s fine. It’s for the Saturday nights.