This portfolio is an interactive visual experience built around a canvas starfield. It explores an artistic depiction of what travelling through a field of stars might look and feel like while presenting my software development work.
Explore the simulation
The meteor button sits at the far left on every screen. Open Scene for Stellar control, fullscreen, rewind, orb controls, preset selection, and Randomize. The star button opens Effects. Both menus work on mobile; Escape closes a menu and restores keyboard focus.
Use Settings to change the starfield direction, speed, density, light, celestial objects, orbs, and other effects. The starfield simulates the tunnel of light you might see while travelling through space at the selected speed and in the selected direction.
Choose Scene → Stellar control to open the floating window. Its View button shows the active mode: View: Triton or View: Beyond_Distance. Triton lets you look around a surrounding starfield. Beyond_Distance restores the original travel view and forward light tunnel. Switching keeps your travel direction, speed, pause, rewind, and recorded journey. Returning to Triton restores your saved viewing direction.
Stellar control groups your view, travel direction, playback, speed, and orb controls. Its +100% and −100% buttons add or subtract 100 percentage points from the configured speed, including through zero, while preserving pause and rewind.
In Triton, use the Look dropdown to choose Centre, Behind, North, North-east, East, South-east, South, South-west, West, or North-west, even while paused. Centre looks ahead. Behind looks directly back, showing stars receding while travelling forward and approaching while travelling backward. Looking left or right shows passing stars across the full view. Looking leaves your travel direction, speed, and rewind unchanged. Beyond_Distance keeps the original Centre view and disables the Look dropdown while saving your Triton bearing, including Behind, for your return.
Orb settings
Choose Orb settings in Stellar control on any page. The Editing orb picker lets you customize individual orbs, including released or off-screen ones. Copies and mutual influence affect the group; the other controls affect the selected orb and apply immediately. When no orbs exist on the page, the panel offers Spawn an orb and All site settings. You can also tap an orb on mobile; the touch hint marks this action. On desktop, right-click the orb, or focus it and press Shift + F10. Drag it to reposition it. Release places it in the travelling starfield, where its influence fades with distance. Use Release all orbs in Stellar control to detach every visible orb at the saved release distance; already released orbs keep their journey. Recall brings them back.
Element orbs keep a circular mass, a compact element name, and a steady illuminated Saturn ring. Gas bands, metal reflections, mineral facets, liquid surfaces, and energetic light follow the selected element. Preset motifs appear inside the sphere, while the starfield separately renders galaxies and nebulae. Drag or tap the orb and use its settings and release controls.
Numeric settings have no minimum, maximum, step, or rounding restrictions. Your values and scene choices stay synchronized across pages and open tabs.
Watch the live variables
All 56 presets now include more stars. Default uses 460% density and 50 bright stars; Randomize suggests 280–950% density and 28–96 bright stars. Settings adds brightness, twinkle strength and speed, trail length, camera zoom, stardust density and opacity, and default orb release distance. Expand Living Universe Variables or press Shift + U to compare requested, allocated, and visible stars and track frame timing, travel, and scene saves. Download universe report saves all 76 applied settings and live orb positions as a local JSON file.
Eight space-event presets explore the Crab remnant, SN 1987A, Orion star formation, a solar coronal mass ejection, a neutron-star merger, Perseid debris, interacting galaxies, and the Pluto flyby. Apply one from Scene or Settings to create its subject-specific objects, camera bearing, and rewindable travel sketch on the current page. Settings shows an original illustration, facts, and a NASA source link. The scenes interpret real events artistically; their motion and scale are illustrative.
Settings and the Shift + U variables table show the active view mode, direction, camera angles, and counts in view. The table also shows your saved Triton direction. Looking or switching modes updates these values immediately, including while paused. Beyond_Distance shows Centre with zero camera angles and no camera field of view. View choices stay synchronized with Settings, saved presets, and your other open pages.
Browse in fullscreen
Choose fullscreen from Scene or press Alt + Enter. Fullscreen stays active when following the portfolio’s page links, with Back and Forward available. Use the Scene control again or your browser’s Escape command to leave fullscreen on the current page. Refreshing or leaving the site ends fullscreen.
Periodic table depictions
The periodic table choices create artistic depictions of elements and the kinds of objects or materials we might encounter in space. Every interactive orb stays a circular mass with element colours, material surfaces, and reflected light. Preset motifs appear inside it; the starfield separately depicts galaxies and nebulae. They are visual interpretations for this experience, not scientifically scaled models or predictions.
Star collisions
Star collisions are an artistic line-of-sight effect: stars move in front of or behind one another and briefly enhance their combined light. They do not represent stars physically crashing into each other.
If the site slows down
Very high Settings values or many simultaneous effects can use more browser memory and reduce performance. If that happens, perform a hard reload with Ctrl + Shift + R on Windows or Linux, or Command + Shift + R on macOS.
When keyboard shortcuts are enabled, press D to apply the Default preset on any page, R to randomize, P to apply the selected preset, or Shift + P to save a named preset. Scene and Settings share the selected preset. Shortcuts leave focused inputs and dropdowns available for editing.