Chaos Studies
attractors and spatial audio (iOS/Mac/Playdate)
Details
- External ID
- 47023510
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Chaos Studies
- Website domain
- fieldbw.com
- Launched
- Feb. 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.28099730458221023
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
My friend built this and I'm blown away with how much fun it is and the high level of polish. It renders 9 different strange attractors (Lorenz, Rössler, Aizawa, Chen, etc.) as particle systems — thousands of particles tracing chaotic paths in real time. You can rotate and zoom with touch/trackpad in 3D.The sound is the part that surprised me. It's not a soundtrack — the audio is generated from the motion itself using spatial audio, so tones shift as the attractor's behavior changes and the sound moves around you as you rotate the form. Put on headphones.The Playdate version uses the crank to rotate the attractor. Pure black and white. It's a completely different vibe.My 9-year-old loves it too, which I wasn't expecting. Would love to hear what HN thinks — especially if anyone has suggestions for other attractor systems worth adding.
Enrichment
- Theme
- custom keyboards and input controllers
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- spatial audio visualization on mobile and portable devices
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While basic strange attractor differential equations can be generated by AI, tuning high-performance multiplatform particle simulations with customized spatialized DSP audio across iOS, macOS, and the low-power Playdate C SDK requires specialized native engineering.
What it would actually take: Building this requires writing optimized native graphics code (Metal compute shaders for iOS/macOS and highly constrained bitmapped C/Lua on Playdate's 168MHz ARM processor). The spatial audio component demands a custom DSP audio engine generating procedural tones linked to 3D particle state vectors. Achieving consistent 60fps across disparate architectures requires deep graphics programming, embedded optimization, and digital audio synthesis expertise.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Playdate version still under development with popup errors
Feature requests: Web demo version
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 149 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #124 of 150 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 109 days after the earliest competitor.
- Strange Attractors · hn · 2025-10-31 · 804 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Yamanote.fun · hn · 2026-07-07 · 238 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Emotive Engine · hn · 2025-10-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker · hn · 2026-01-22 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Audio Player with "Binaural Beats" tuned to the same key as your music · hn · 2026-07-24 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Procedural Music Workstation in the Browser · hn · 2026-03-06 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Rmp, a Subsonic music player for generating playlists on the fly · hn · 2026-08-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- chaosorts · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.