Hero culture
A small neural culture you can fire and plant a cell in.
Anatomy
| Culture | cell bodies with tapering dendrite trees, axons that wander to their nearest neighbours, a cell born or starved every few seconds |
|---|---|
| Firing | an action potential: the bloom rises over 90ms and falls exponentially, over in about 0.6s |
| Pulses | dense grain running down the axons, the head a solid streak over the ground it covered since the last frame and the tail continuous over its last 150ms of travel; the cell they reach blooms and sometimes fires in turn |
| thresholded against the Bayer matrix at ≈2px, in --tissue on the paper, with a half-strength grain halo and glows at 80% | |
| Tap | fires the nearest cell, with a disc of --state grain 36px across where it landed, thinning away over 750ms |
| Hold | a --state seed at 220ms, planted at 620ms: it grows at twice the culture’s rate, wires to its two nearest neighbours and fires |
| Arrival | every cell wakes by its distance from where the cascade fired, over 0.9s |
| Cost | about 75ms of main thread a second at 1440 while in view, nothing off screen; the sway redraws every 300ms, firing blooms at 30fps |
| Reduced motion | starts grown and still; no luminance |
From src/lib/exposure/neurons.ts and the guide’s Motion §3.
Decisions
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Stationary and 2D
No camera drift, parallax, depth layers or lit 3D bodies: a version with relit specimen sprites read as bubbly and rigid.
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The name overlays it
Fibres run straight behind the type and fade towards the paper near it. Routing round the letters traced them; fading the whole field greyed the culture.
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Fade from the cell
Bodies and the tissue near them print in full tissue, and fibres fade towards the paper with distance from the nearest body, so each cell reads as a node and long axons as faint threads. Pulses keep full strength. At one tone the culture read as a busy mesh competing with the name (Nov 2026).
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Luminance
A tap answers with a disc of --state grain, so a touch reads as having landed somewhere; a firing alone, often a cell some way off, didn’t show it (Oct 2026).
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Planting
The first thing a visitor can do to the culture leaves a mark of their own, rather than only setting off a firing that fades (Oct 2026).
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Replaced Ambience
The sine field behind a 50% scrim that the hero used until Oct 2026, because it read as generic.
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The shutter
The signals draw what moved during the frame, not where they are at the frame: motion blur in 1-bit, the one law read literally (Nov 2026). It replaced a flash that stepped to full and drained in a straight line, a pulse head that moved past its own width every frame and strobed, and blooms redrawn on a timer. Shan found the site’s curves read as linear and asked for the fast, fluid look of reels that seem to outrun the display; that comes from per-frame blur and easing with its velocity up front, not frame rate, so the 60fps cap stands and the cost did not rise.