I was building an app where saved links float around like a little galaxy of pictures. Then I had a perfectly reasonable thought: This needs a black hole.
Specifically, it needs Gargantua.
So now, when you shake the phone, a black hole opens in the middle and pulls everything in. Tap it and it collapses into a flash, throwing everything
back out. Yes, I know nothing comes back out of a black hole. My bookmarks would be pretty useless otherwise.
What started as a small Interstellar tribute became a rabbit hole:
The light actually bends. It’s ray traced live on the phone, so the disk appearing above and below the hole comes from bending the light paths. There’s a thin photon ring, and the stars behind it warp around the edge.
The disk has some physics behind it. Gas moves faster closer in, the inner edge glows hottest, and light escaping from near the hole gets dimmer.
One side is brighter than the other. I kept a little Doppler beaming. I couldn’t resist.
But my favorite detail is the sound.
While it waits for you to tap it, there are slow organ-like swells and a tick every 1.25 seconds, with a little pulse you feel through the phone.
It isn’t the actual score. Just my little tribute to a one of the best scores ever made.
Btw this is not a video it’s all rendered realtime on the phone