Hands-on
The Squid in Your Hand
The Squid Nebula floats at arm's length: twin blue lobes of oxygen light inside a red cloud of hydrogen. Turn it, resize it, step inside it, and replay its 90,000 years.
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
- Ou4, the Squid, is an outflow inside the hydrogen cloud Sh2-129. The model is two bullet-shaped lobes, 6.4 and 7.6 parsecs long, whose thin shocked walls fold into bright creases as gas slides along them at about 80 km/s. The time axis is compressed and labelled, not to scale, and your wind is a ripple that relaxes back, not real gas dynamics.
- 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 Squid 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.