Hands-on
The Ring in Your Hand
The Ring Nebula floats at arm's length: a blue hollow inside gold and red rings, studded with thousands of knots. Turn it and the ring becomes a barrel; step inside it; replay how it formed.
Drag with one finger to turn it like a ball; pinch to make it bigger or smaller. Tap for its controls: the time slider and ▶ replay how it formed, the filter button swaps Both, Hα and O III, Step inside grows it round you, and Wind lets a swipe blow through the gas.
- The idea
- M57, the Ring: a barrel of gas round a hollow blown by a dying star's fast wind, coloured by zones of ionisation, with about 20,000 dense globules that each trail a stream down their shadow. The detail follows the look of the James Webb Space Telescope's images. The shell is a closed-form stand-in for a full hydrodynamic simulation; the time axis is compressed; your wind is a ripple.
- With music
- It doesn't react to the music: it moves by itself, in silence too. Tap Demo beat for our own beat, or Your music to let it hear the room.
- How it runs
- It’s the same live simulation as in the Everdust apps, running in your browser on WebGL 2. If your device struggles, it lowers the detail a step at a time to keep the motion smooth.
This is just a taste
Loved The Ring in Your Hand? There are many more worlds in the app.
The Everdust app has every world at full detail, plus games made of physics, stories you step inside, Create (turn any photo into a world), and hand tracking on Vision Pro and Quest. Free during the beta.