Strange Attractor Studio

How does this run in your browser?

There is no server doing the work. The whole thing is a single web page that hands the heavy lifting to your graphics card through WebGL2. About a million points are stored in a floating-point texture. Every animation frame, a tiny shader reads each point and advances it by one step of the attractor equation, writing the new positions back. Those points are then drawn additively into a separate buffer, so brighter areas mean more points landed there. A final pass tone-maps that density field, runs it through a colour palette, and you see art forming and sharpening in real time.

This is the same idea behind fractal-flame renderers, but it happens live at sixty frames a second because the GPU updates and draws all million points in parallel. It also means your work never leaves the machine, there is no upload, and the equations you explore are yours alone.

What is a strange attractor?

Take a point, apply a simple equation to it, then apply the same equation to the result, again and again. For most equations the point either flies off to infinity or settles into a boring loop. But some equations are chaotic: the path never repeats, yet it never escapes either. It keeps tracing a delicate, infinitely detailed shape. That shape is the attractor, and the four families here, Clifford, De Jong, Svensson and Fractal Dream, are classic two-dimensional examples, each controlled by four numbers you can drag.

Tips for finding good ones

Hit Surprise me until something catches your eye, then nudge the a, b, c and d sliders slowly. Small changes can swing a pattern from a tangled knot to a clean ribbon. Pull the exposure down for fine, wiry detail or up for a soft glow, and zoom in when a piece has interesting structure near the centre. When you find a keeper, Copy link saves the exact settings in the URL so you can share it or come back to it, and Save PNG renders a clean high-resolution version, up to 4K, for a wallpaper or print.