Chaos Studies
attractors and spatial audio (iOS/Mac/Playdate)
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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.
HN · launched Feb 15, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views
Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Hardware & robotics
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →
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 : 237 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #205 of 238 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 109 days after the earliest competitor.
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- sound-physics-textbook · github · 2026-10-01 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.42
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