A Public Domain Gallery of Vintage 3D Effects

Welcome to a CC0 curated museum of legacy graphical techniques. The premise is simple: ~~spend hours coding~~ just copy a demo and drop it directly into your web page.

"Copy a demo, drop it on a page."

🛠️ Implementation Workflow

🏛️ The Exhibit Catalog

Below is a comprehensive list of the available experiments, ranging from early analog signals to futuristic visualizations.

Era/Year	Technique Name	Description & Nuance
1968	Trumbull	A "Stargate" effect utilizing a moving slit-scan.
1970s	Vector CRT	XY oscilloscope style; features Lissajous figures and phosphor persistence.
1973	Rutt/Etra	A scan where luminance values displace the video raster.
1980	Whitted	A classic raytracer featuring three spheres, shadows, a checkerboard, and 3-bounce reflections.
1984	Atari	I, Robot style polygons; filled pyramids/cubes using the painter's algorithm.
1986	Martin	The "Hopalong" attractor; a single-line iterator that fills a CRT screen.
1990	SNES	Mode 7 floor; an affine checkerboard ground reminiscent of Space Harrier.
1990	Amiga	Glenz vectors; additive, translucent filled polygons.
1991	Demoscene	A twisting tunnel composed of dots and squares.
1992	Demoscene	A fullscreen fragment shader running a plasma color-field oscillator.
1993	Hyperspace	A perspective starfield that warps into a hyperspace tunnel.
1993	GL Workstation	A flat-shaded torus featuring a wire overlay and a ground grid.
1993	Demoscene	Palette fire; heat rising via a 256-color Look-Up Table (LUT).
1994	IRIX	A wireframe globe with a latitude/longitude cage and phosphor strokes.
1995	Metaballs	Raymarched chrome blobs set in a studio environment.
1995	PlayStation	PS1-style affine warp; checkerboard floor/cube using screen-space UVs.
1996	Vector Field	A curling flow field guiding one thousand particles.
2006	`donut.c`	A rotating 3D torus rendered using a luminance character ramp (ASCII).
2026	Sci-Viz	A concentrating 3D "Spaghetti vortex."
1986 / 2026	Martin	Spiral stretch; a relative of the Hopalong attractor where $z$ grows as the radius shrinks.

🔍 Technical Deep Dive

Some of these effects rely on specific mathematical foundations. For example, the Vector CRT's Lissajous figures can be described by: $x = A\sin(at + \delta), \quad y = B\sin(bt)$

To implement these, you might interact with the data via the provided API:

{
  "experiment": "metaballs",
  "year": 1995,
  "technique": "raymarching",
  "license": "CC0"
}

📋 Museum Checklist

For AI Agents: The machine-readable catalog is available at the following endpoints:

/llms.txt
/api/v1/experiments