You stay still. The dream moves.
Most of ADdes is a picture that breathes. A journey is the other thing: shapes open up far ahead and fly around you, glowing frames drift toward you and you pass through them, and a flame is wrapped inside an endless tube that falls, very slowly, toward a still light.
Shapes that open as they pass you
Press J (or Voyage on the VR dock) for a voyage now, or choose the Voyage feel in the menu to dream only voyages. Random includes them too.
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With the sketch focused: left and right change the way of travelling, up looks ahead, down looks behind. Space holds everything still.
A sketch in your browser, not the engine. Each shape here is the fractal’s leaf points moved by a small program; in ADdes your graphics card draws the shapes point by point along random paths of their maps, and the sound follows them. This keeps the shapes, the four ways of travelling and the comfort rules, but not the engine’s light.
The shapes
A voyage is made of 3D fractals: Menger boxes (boxes of boxes), Sierpinski pyramids and octahedra, Vicsek crosses and Cantor dust.
The sound
Between passes the drone is muffled. As a shape passes you it opens wide, and behind you it closes again, so a shape that has passed sounds darker than one at the same distance ahead. Each shape also carries a soft whoosh of air that pans with it and drops in pitch as it goes by.
Deterministic
A voyage is a pure function of its seed and its clock, picture and sound alike.
A life in four steps
- Appears It appears far ahead as a point, and grows.
- Opens At about 20 m it opens up: its pieces shrink apart and turn, so air opens between them.
- Flies past It flies toward you and passes around you, opening a little further as it goes by.
- Closes Behind you it closes again and fades.
Four ways of travelling
- Drift One at a time, anywhere around you.
- Rings Of four or five that you pass through, turning slowly.
- Spiral Each one a golden angle further round.
- Procession Left, right, left, like lanterns along a road.
Frames you pass through
Press K (or Hallway on the VR dock) for a neon hallway now, or choose the Neon Hallway feel to dream only hallways. Glowing outlines fly toward you, one every two or three seconds, and you pass through each one. The hallway recedes to a point far ahead.
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With the sketch focused: up and down change the speed, left and right change the flavour. Space holds everything still.
A sketch in your browser, drawn with lines on a flat canvas, not the engine. In ADdes every frame and tendril is made of the fractal’s own points and drawn by your graphics card. This follows the same rules (the slow morph, the breathing wave, the neon spacing of colour) but not the same light. Wormhole and Psychedelic are simpler drawings of their hallways.
They morph, slowly
Square, rounded, circle, hexagon, and back (some hallways use octagons or triangles). The number of sides changes only while a frame is a circle, so no step is ever visible. A full square to circle takes at least 10 s, and each frame is a little further along the morph than the one before, so you see the morph down the hallway too.
Tendrils breathe on every edge
Fine curling wisps grow outward from the outlines. Each branches twice, like a small flame. They swell and curl at the dream’s breath, 6.5 times a minute, in a slow wave that travels around the frame. They grow as a frame nears and wither a little behind you.
Neon colours
Each hallway takes its palette’s brightest, most saturated colours, at least 35° of hue apart. Each frame’s tube is one colour, and its tendrils take the next as an accent. Frames alternate through the colours.
Some twist, some bend
Some hallways twist (each frame turned a few degrees from the one before), and some bend: the hallway ahead curves away, and the bend slowly turns, but every frame straightens onto your path before it reaches you.
The sound
The drone opens wide as you pass through each frame and closes between them, with a soft whoosh and a Doppler drop as the frame’s rim passes around you.
Two more hallways
The menu groups three. The Wormhole Hallway is the Flame Tunnel’s flames on hoops you fly through, each with a sleeve that wraps around you as you pass. The Psychedelic Hallway is a kaleidoscope tunnel of Prism Bloom’s rainbow spirals all around you, rippling in waves that come toward you and slowly turning, with bands of colour flowing along it and discs floating past beyond its walls. They travel at the same gentle pace, ease in over 10 s, and Space freezes them.
Fall toward a still light
The Flame Tunnel is a symmetric flame painted inside an endless tube that flows toward a still, glowing core far ahead. The Trance Tunnel is its quieter cousin: a still cone ahead, with the flames wrapped around it.
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Flow is the fastest wall motion anywhere in view, in degrees a second. Wedges off is a Flame Tunnel; a number is a Trance Tunnel of that many mirrored wedge pairs. With the viewer focused: up and down change the Flow, left and right change the wedges. Space holds everything still.
A sketch in your browser, not the engine. It paints this page’s small in-browser dream inside a tube with one small program, so you can feel the idea. In ADdes the walls are the flame’s own points, drawn by your graphics card. The app eases the flow in over 24 s; this sketch takes half as long, since a visit to a web page is shorter than a night in a headset. And as in the Trance Tunnel, turning wedges on slows the fall to half of the Flow.
How it moves
A tunnel flows as a slow zoom along its tube: the walls come toward you from the core, fastest about 45° from where you look and nearly still at the edge of your vision. The flow never jumps. Space freezes it at once, and it eases back in. The tube never rolls, and the core stays dead ahead. Start gentle: your body is the judge.
In ADdes the fastest wall motion is set under Menu, Motion, Wormhole flow. In the headset the tube runs behind you too, flowing away.
The Trance Tunnel
A still cone ahead: no twist, no ripple, and no tube behind you. It is a kaleidoscope of 2N mirrored wedges, with N from 6 to 12 for each dream, and in the headset it is drawn 270° around ahead of you. The mirrors stay put while the flame turns behind them, as in a real kaleidoscope. And the fall is half a wormhole’s flow.
You stay still, and the numbers are small
Looking at a tunnel is where motion sickness lives, so every journey keeps to limits that are checked, not hoped for. You stay still and the shapes move; the backdrop never moves.
| Journey | The limit |
|---|---|
| Voyage | Nothing comes within 0.9 m of your head. No shape crosses your view faster than 52°/s at 1×. The voyage never runs faster than 2×, whatever the speed setting. |
| Neon hallway | Nothing drawn comes within 1.29 m of your head, and nothing crosses your view faster than 45°/s at 1×. |
| Wormhole and Psychedelic hallways | Nothing comes within 0.9 m of your head, or passes faster than 0.9 rad/s. |
| Tunnel | The fastest wall motion is 6°/s by default, 0 to hold it still, up to 18. The flow eases in over 24 s. |
How the calm is measured → · The same journeys, in a headset →