About

Who makes it

Splashery is made by Ryan Kamp. 3D Gaussian splats make stunning scans of real things, but they are usually something you only watch. Splashery asks what happens if you can play with them.

What it is

Every Splash is drawn with 3D Gaussian splats: soft, colored blobs that together make a capture of a real thing, or a shape built from a recipe. There are 460 Splashes in 29 lanes today, from captures to atoms, planets, math, and games, plus tools that turn your own photos, pages, and sounds into splats.

You can poke, paint, blow on, drop, and dissolve them, then share one as a link, an embed, a GIF, or a video. It is plain web pages and code, with no app to install and no account.

What a splat is explains the idea, with live demos.

The pool

The water on these pages is a real wave solver. One foot is 16 pixels on every screen, so a phone looks down on a pool about 24 feet wide. A ring moves at the square root of gravity times depth, the speed of a long wave in water that deep, which is why rings run faster toward the deep end of the home page. The light on the tile is found by bending sunlight through the moving surface with Snell's law, so a ring throws its own line of light on the floor. Water takes red out of light long before blue, and the pool does too, with the absorption Pope and Fry measured for pure water in 1997 and a little haze added. Tilt your phone and the pool leans, and the water rocks from wall to wall. Turn on Sound under Pool lights and a drop rings at the pitch of the air bubble it traps, by Minnaert's 1933 rule: 3.26 meters per second divided by the bubble's radius.

Offline

The Playground keeps each Splash you open on your device, so it opens again with no connection, up to 1 GB of Splashes. Past that, the one you opened longest ago goes first. You can install the Playground from your browser to keep it in your Dock or on your Home Screen.

The rest of this site, the The Splash Manual, and a Splash you haven't opened need a connection.

What it promises

The short version is on the sign. Privacy has the details, and every capture, picture, sound, and dataset is credited beside its Splash and on the credits page. Where a maker's name or logo was painted over, the credit says so, and How marks are painted over shows how.

The small print

The code is under the MIT license, and each Splash's assets keep their own licenses. See Credits, How to cite, Privacy, Terms, and Contact.