Pulsar

About this page

Above is a GPU-accelerated nebula simulation. Below is a short guide explaining what you are seeing, how the visual effect is created, and how to run it smoothly on your device. The intention is to connect visual intuition with a few practical rendering notes.

What you’re seeing

The animation begins with a small central seed that quickly expands into a thin, bright rim. As the shell grows, noise-driven advection and instanced particle rendering create tangled, radially stretched strands that suggest filamentation. Additive blending is applied, with depth writes disabled, so that the rim remains smooth and glowing without speckled artifacts.

Tech notes (GPU-hybrid)

In WebGL2 mode, tens of thousands of particles are rendered as instanced billboards with additive blending in a single draw call. When WebGPU is enabled through ?gpu=1, particle updates are processed in a compute pass before being rendered in one instanced draw, minimizing CPU overhead and improving stability on fast devices.

Compatibility

The simulation works on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox via WebGL2. WebGPU is available on modern versions of Chrome and Edge as well as recent Safari releases; if unsupported, the visualization automatically falls back to WebGL2.

FAQ

Why does the rim look brightest? The apparent brightness comes from the high particle density at the expanding front, combined with additive blending that concentrates light along the edge.

Is this physically exact? No. This is a stylized visualization that focuses on motion and texture rather than an exact physical simulation of nebular dynamics.

Credits

This simulation is inspired by particle-based nebula renderings and modern GPGPU techniques in real-time graphics.