100,000 Stars A Google Chrome Experiment

is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood of our region of the universe, which was created within the Google Chrome web browser environment.

"It shows the location of 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission. Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars and our solar system. The galaxy view is an artist's rendition based on NGC 1232, a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way."

One can choose to navigate automatically by clicking on the Tour button at the top of the page. Alternatively one can choose to manually pan the map with one's mouse. With a mouse button held down and arcing the mouse around one swing the whole complex and or moving the mouse in or out enables zooming. The tall vertical bar on the right of the screen allows one to push towards the focus of the map our sun and solar system or sliding the bar towards the bottom of the length reveals an edge of the Milky way galaxy.

The creators of this interactive map warn that accuracy is not guaranteed and does not comply with reality standards of interstellar navigation. this stimulating web toy was programmed by some space enthusiasts at Google. The delightful music is by Sam Hulick, whose work you may be familiar with from the video game, Mass Effect. The track is entitled “In a Strange Land” and is used with his permission.

A complete list of references used in conjunction with making this interesting star chart our found by clicking the question mark in the bottom right hand corner.

Tolia Demidov's Web browser experiments

are in my opinion, web toys or website toys since they largely involve a user's willing participation in interactive play - a kind of virtual art.

The first thing you'll notice when you visit Tolia's website is that mousing over the words on the page surreptitiously reveal appearing and disappearing images, in essence the samples of each listed web toy.

If you've not yet had the opportunity of playing with a website toy, then I offer you this little guide to help you start playing with Tolia's fun website:

The image here in this post is snapped from the Lab - Illusion. After you click that link you'll notice when you move the page up and down with your mouse that there is a rectangle that floats over the other images. If you grab that gauze rectangle with your mouse and drag it up or down left or right, the other images appear to behave like little wiggle movies. This action is as a result of moire interference where pixels of the gauze cause an interruption of the light and shade with the  intersecting image below, or adjacent to it - a kind of stop-motion animation.

To learn what little there is about Tolia and discover which other web toy experimenters he likes, then the Grateful Grapefruit blogger, managed a small interview, with him, here.

Choice Interactive Web Toys of Andre Michelle

Andre Michelle's AM Laboratory has developed a number of cool musical toys and special effects to explore.  Play with and create some calmly pulsating circles within circles, simply by  following her navigation commands on each link you try.

"Click to create at least two circles.  Listen to the tunes they make.  Press Space to clear them all."

Here is a collection of her studies she extracted while developing her commercial projects or just by researching new technologies."

The SuperEllipse is a 3D Sound-visualizer based on research by Paul Bourke accompanied by the cool chill music by Alva Noto & Opiate.

Or try my favorite The Color Traces web toy.

Historical Tweets: Marie Antoinette: Let Them Tweet Cake!

If you tweet on twitter as I do than you may enjoy this entertaining web toy site through which you can search for a moment or place or event or person in history and reinvent the twitter timeline.

"Books have been ruining history. So many unnecessary words.  Now, with Historical Tweets, history’s most amazing men and women can be fully understood, a mere 140 characters at a time."

Be sure to hit the random button at the top of the page for more historical tweets.

PingWire: Sharing Pictures Is Easy with this new web toy

This looks to be an interesting solution for those who love pictures. PingWire is an (almost) live feed of images being posted to twitter with Twitpic, yfrog, and Twitgoo.

The web page displays them in a never-ending stream of thumbnails. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to the full sized photo. Mind that you will have to be quick to succeed at getting the picture you thought you hit.

The Secret Garden of Mutabor by Yenz

is an interactive point and click [flash] adventure game with niche graphics, minimal audio and intriguing design:

"The Secret Garden of Mutabor is in great danger. You just came in time to save us! Time is running out, save the secret garden."

Good luck and enjoy !

William Rood : : Fractal Web Toy

Freelance mathematician, filmmaker, visionary artist, designer, and author of 'Introducing Fractal Geometry,' William Rood has built, a streaming visual spaghetti of fractal heaven.

Navigating the interface seems to have been left up to viewers to explore and discover, but if you click the top arrow on the inner left side, the fractal generator will cycle through the slides at the bottom. Also the very small square at the bottom right, zooms to full screen, and collapsing the full screen by pressing the Escape key on your keyboard, will allow further selections.

The fractal manifolds Rood has encoded are somewhat reminiscent of Kai's Power Tools, Fractal Explorer, continue.

Yooouuutuuube : : absolutely delightful Web Toy

that turns a single YouTube video into a surreal grid made of copies of itself. The rows of the grid are slightly out of sync with one another, creating a ripple effect.

Mouse over the bottom of your open window to control the options which include the frame size of the grid squares and the size of the rows and columns. While you're watching, there are pan, track and zoom controls that let you move over the whole bizarre like it was one screen.

I made this one with Checkersplitter by Degenerate Art Ensemble

One of the best demonstrations of how much fun Yooouuutuuube can be is this amazing Alice in Wonderland, or you may fancy the Dramatic Chipmunk.


Have a go, make your yooouuutuuube, then paste your yooouuutuuube video links in the Comments below.

Aaron Meyers presents YouCube

Aaron Meyers has created a neat way for viewers of you tube videos to interact and or play with up to 6 video selections or favorites. Go here to experience the TranceQube YouCube sample by Jaroslav Svobode. Alternatively go here to browse for something more to your taste.

After the page loads you simply swivel the cube around with your mouse to create overlapping audio visual effects, where each viewer discovers coincidence and accidents of transposition and imposition of their own making.

It maybe worth noting that unless you have superfast broadband you may be best to wait for each video to download into its respective window, that is, flip the cube around to load each facet. Here is my first attempt.


"YouCube is a little project I’ve put together over the last two days. It allows you to map YouTube videos onto an interactive 3D cube and then save it to a database so you can show your friends. As you spin around a YouCube, the sounds of the different videos fade in and out. Its fun! I apologize that the functionality for browsing the YouCube database is currently just an incredibly crude html page. I hope to build something a bit nicer real soon. Special thanks to everyone who made cubes and helped me test yesterday. This was all put together rather hastily so if you find bugs that need my attention, please drop me a note about it. Visit the YouCube page and get cracking!"

Here is the YouCube Video Demo and or start a new cube here.