Enter Descent — fullscreen; scroll to descend.
Descent is an endless zoom into a procedural fractal landscape, driven entirely by scrolling. It started with a post by Yohei Nishitsuji, who compresses whole raymarched worlds into GLSL fragment shaders small enough to fit in a tweet. One of those tiny formulas — a landscape folded through log-polar space — became the engine of this piece, and the piece is really an attempt to give that formula somewhere to go.
The seed shader is kept almost intact; what changed is what drives it. Time was swapped for depth, and depth is fed by a momentum model: scrolling adds velocity to the zoom, which decays with inertia, and a slow idle drift keeps the descent alive even when you let go.
The zoom never ends and never breaks. The landscape geometry is exactly periodic in log-space, so wrapping depth reproduces identical structure — floating-point precision never accumulates, and infinite depth always reveals more of the same kind of terrain. Each pass through the loop carries its own hue, so revisiting the same geometry feels like arriving in new weather.
The formula can also be mutated live. Keys 0–5 switch between variants, each with one pointer-driven axis:
Origin The seed, untouched.
Kaleidoscope The domain folds into mirror sectors; pointer x sets how many.
Spiral Foreground and background wind into a vortex around the terrain shell.
Look The pointer steers the view through the tunnel.
Rorschach A mirror seam splits the world; pointer x drags it.
Breathe The terrain inhales and exhales; pointer y sets the depth of the breath.
Every variant has to preserve the loop — a warp that breaks the periodicity would make the seam visible at the cycle boundary. Descent is the first piece in a small series of self-contained, zero-build web experiences.