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The Ghost in the Swarm

Particle Life on your GPU, with an invisible field that quietly steers a hundred thousand particles through sacred geometry.

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Controls

Force Matrix

Row attracts column. Green = attract, red = repel. Click a cell to cycle. Shift-click to randomize one cell.

Rogue field

An invisible flow that slowly morphs through golden-ratio and sacred-geometry patterns, conducting the whole swarm.

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Physics

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Your saves

Save the current setup to a slot; click a filled slot to load it. Hold a slot (or right-click) to delete. Slots persist in your browser.

Two systems share this canvas. The dots are Particle Life: a hundred thousand specks on your GPU, each obeying one tiny rule about whom to chase and whom to flee. Out of that alone come cells, chains, and shapes that look unsettlingly alive. The second system is the ghost.

A starling murmuration at dusk: thousands of birds massed into a single dense, flowing shape over a field.
A starling murmuration. Thousands of birds, no leader, each minding only its nearest neighbors, and out of that comes one shape that folds and pours across the sky. The same trick as the swarm above. Photo by Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The part that's mine

An invisible hand

Watch a while and you'll catch the whole swarm leaning into a slow, coherent shape, then dissolving and leaning into the next. That is an unseen flow field laid over the simulation, morphing forever through golden-ratio spirals, mandalas, quasicrystals and the flower of life, the way an old Winamp visualizer drifted from one scene into the next.

The trick that keeps it alive instead of dead: each pattern is a curl field. The force runs along the geometry's contours instead of toward it, so the particles stream around the shape and keep their own behavior while they trace it, never collapsing into a few bright points.

It is choreography, not a cage. The field suggests; the swarm still argues.

137.5° the golden angle, seed of the sunflower spiral and one of ten shapes in the tour

The controls live under Rogue field: turn it off for bare Particle Life, push the strength until it takes the wheel, step the shapes by hand, or split dense clusters and loose dust onto two patterns at once. The simulation itself descends from Ventrella's Clusters, Tom Mohr's Particle Life, and lisyarus's WebGPU port; the ghost is the piece I added. Source: particle-life.js.