A laser-scan aesthetic without a laser: landscapes, a vaulted nave, a tree and a knot are sampled into hundreds of thousands of points, swept by a scanning plane, and slowly taken apart by a decomposition front that drifts through a 3D noise field. Drop any image to turn its brightness into depth.
Drag to orbit · scroll or pinch to zoom · drop an image onto the stage. Everything runs on your GPU; images never leave your device.
Every subject is generated in the browser as a list of surface samples — no scanned data is downloaded. The landscape is a ridged fractal heightfield; the nave is a run of equilateral pointed arches (two circular arcs whose radius equals the span) over columns and a tiled floor; the tree is a recursive branching structure sampled on each branch's cylinder in proportion to its surface area; the knot is a (2,3) torus-knot tube. In Image mode each pixel becomes a point whose depth is its Rec. 709 luminance, 0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B.
All motion happens in one vertex shader. The scan is a horizontal plane moving through the cloud; points near it glow with a Gaussian falloff, and in Reveal mode points above it are not yet "measured". The decomposition front sweeps along the x axis: behind it, each point is displaced by a 3D value-noise vector field whose strength grows with the square of its distance past the front, plus an upward bias — so structure erodes edge-first, like wind on sand, rather than exploding uniformly. Slice glitch quantizes the cloud into horizontal bands and shifts random bands sideways on a 6 Hz clock, the signature artefact of misregistered scan passes.
Points are drawn additively (overlapping points add light), which is why dense regions bloom — the same reason real LiDAR point clouds read as luminous. Exposure is scaled by the point count so switching density doesn't change overall brightness much.
A study in the language of scan-based installation work — most directly Ryoichi Kurokawa's decomposing point-cloud landscapes and architecture, and Refik Anadol's data sculptures. It is not a recreation of any specific work, and it is not affiliated with either studio.