Poplar walk

A world drawn in particles

Everywhere else on this site, the particles lie flat on the page. The poplar walk is the first with depth: you walk down a gravel road between tall poplars, seen from eye height, and the trees, the gravel and the grass are all drawn in points. Fourteen paths fork off the avenue and off each other. They go to a ginkgo grove, a bamboo grove, a river, woods of birch, pine, beech and redwood, a wood in fog, an orchard, a coast path, a lake at night, a park with a temple on its hill, a moor and the bare mountain above it. There’s a cave under the roots of one tree.

One set of laws

Each place was built on its own, and each made its own guesses about the light and the ground. So the world has laws, each defined once, and a test checks every path against them. There’s one sun, fixed in the sky, so the light comes from a new side as the path bends. One wind sways every crown and carries every falling leaf. Everything stands on the ground of its place and lands on it when it falls. The weather is the same on every path at once, and a rainbow shows only where the sun is low enough for one. It’s late summer everywhere.

How it’s made

The page draws with WebGL2: each point is a sprite, sized and faded by its distance, over a sky and a ground. A worker builds the world 20 metres at a time as you come near, and each place’s code downloads only as you approach it, so the first load holds none of them. There are no images or recordings. The trees grow from a fixed seed, so the woods are the same on every visit, and the sound is made as you walk: each footstep is made new from a stride of its own length and weight, so the steps never fall into a loop. Sound is off until you turn it on. The walk opens at night unless you’ve chosen the light theme.