Ephemera instrument

A gas, played

A real compressible-gas simulation running on your GPU, sonified by a resonator bank. Strike it and shocks, vortices, and sound bloom across the screen - and on this page, every headline is made of the same gas.

Ignite the gas →See how it works

WebGPU
Resonator bank
Shocks & vortices

The catch

The text is gas

The headings on this page are not images and not fonts dressed up to look smoky. They are rasterized into the same fluid field that runs the instrument, then carried by the flow - they drift, ripple, and reform as the gas moves.

Where your browser can't run the simulation, the words fall back to readable text with a gaseous shimmer, and the background settles into a soft drifting haze. Nothing is ever lost - the real text is always in the page.

How it works

Strike, simulate, sound

01
Strike the field
Click or drag on the gas. You inject momentum - a vortex kick or a continuous jet - straight into a compressible Euler solver running on your GPU.
02
Watch the physics
Shocks, vortices, and contact discontinuities form for real: HLLC fluxes, slope-limited reconstruction, RK2 in time. No fakery, no sprite sheets.
03
Hear it resonate
Probes sample the flow and drive a bank of resonators. Vorticity becomes pitch, density becomes timbre - the gas is the score.

Features

Physics you can play

Real compressible flow

A finite-volume Euler solver - HLLC Riemann fluxes, minmod reconstruction, RK2 - on a widescreen GPU grid. Shocks and vortices are emergent, not animated.

Sonified by resonators

A grid of probes reads the field and feeds a resonator bank plus a GPU-synthesised gas body. The flow's vorticity and density shape pitch, timbre, and noise.

Scenes & view modes

Blast, Kármán street, shock wedge, Kelvin - Helmholtz, steam-pipe organ - each a full preset. Render as density, schlieren, vorticity, dye, or ink.

Text written in smoke

A glyph-stamp pass paints letters as constant-pressure contacts, so titles reform crisply without a blast - the same path that makes this page's words gas.

Access

Open it in a tab

Gasman runs entirely in your browser with no account or download. Bring a WebGPU-capable browser (recent Chrome, Edge, or Safari) for the live simulation; everywhere else still gets the full page.

Price: Free
Install: None. Runs in the browser.
Needs: A WebGPU browser

Ignite the gas →

Questions

Frequently asked

It's real. Gasman runs a finite-volume compressible Euler solver on your GPU every frame — HLLC Riemann fluxes, slope-limited reconstruction, and RK2 time stepping. The shocks and vortices you see are emergent physics, not a pre-rendered loop.

Go play the gas

Strike the field, watch the shocks roll, and hear the flow sing. It's a tab away.

Ignite the gas →Explore the family