I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around

29 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by bilsbie

32 Comments

petronic

10 hours ago

Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot.

I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.

Ohentis

7 hours ago

I feel like "webgpu doesn't work on safari" has been a recurring theme lately. Does anyone know why?

embedding-shape

9 hours ago

Indeed, it also froze both Firefox and Chrome running on Arch with a Threadripper 9970X. Not sure what kind of hardware is able to run this webpage.

Angostura

10 hours ago

On iOS Safari:

Island Three could not start

Range consisting of offset and length are out of bounds

Reloading the page may help. A screenshot of this to @gruberbuilds on X helps fix it.

I’m not on X

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

Jtarii

10 hours ago

Takes forever to load, runs terribly and looks awful.

iagooar

10 hours ago

Not my experience at all.

Jtarii

9 hours ago

Motivated by this comment I decided to give it another shot, the tab crashed immediately upon clicking the "fly" button.

Retr0id

9 hours ago

I managed to get a whole 5fps

AmazingEveryDay

11 hours ago

> The sunlight here comes from its mirrors, and its "gravity" comes from its spin.

Where do the clouds come from? The AI?

ben_w

10 hours ago

I can't use the site on my phone, can barely even read any of the text, so I don't know the text you're quoting.

If you are asking if clouds in such a structure are realistic, I'd expect so: clouds do form naturally in even much smaller spaces, e.g. one of the NASA buildings, I forget if it was the Saturn V or Space Shuttle assembly building or both.

nickff

10 hours ago

The Vertical Assembly Building was used for both the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle, though it had much more ‘headroom’ for the latter. From what I’ve read the rumors of clouds forming inside of it are actually a myth, though there are condensation and airflow issues. I don’t have citations handy as it’s been a while (decade) since I’ve read this.

winston_smith_

9 hours ago

"This browser doesn't have WebGPU

Island Three draws with WebGPU, which Firefox for Android doesn't have yet. Open this page in Chrome."

lol, no thanks

OutOfHere

10 hours ago

Over half the people can't run it right or at all. Why not share some representative walkthrough videos?

RobotToaster

10 hours ago

Anyone else getting this error on android chrome?

>HipparcosGraphics error on arm valhall: device lost: A valid external Instance reference no longer exists. (tap to close; a screenshot to @gruberbuilds helps fix it)

RobotToaster

10 hours ago

update: I just tried it on firefox on windows and it works fine there.

xg15

9 hours ago

The weirdest experience in this must be to never know if you're walking uphill or downhill.

Sharlin

9 hours ago

The further uphill you walk the easier it becomes as the apparent gravity decreases.

ChrisMarshallNY

9 hours ago

I'm sure it's awesome, but my puny Mac Mini M4Pro won't render it...

aarontian0

10 hours ago

This is crazy Claude built this.

hoelle

10 hours ago

Neat. I enjoyed the NPCs chatting about life onboard.

notfried

10 hours ago

I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds.

I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation.

Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.

Avamander

10 hours ago

I suspect it needs a few tokens spent on optimization and clean-up.

maxlin

9 hours ago

I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.

Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...

jakzurr

8 hours ago

Oh, great idea! Maybe consider building it with Orbiter Simulator?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiter_(simulator)

https://www.orbiter-forum.com/

https://github.com/orbitersim/orbiter

I believe it supports C and Lua.

maxlin

7 hours ago

I played Orbiter near its release - this is quite far from my intention with its focus on spacecraft and generally a low detail level.

My intention would be a game simulating, at least on a surface level, life inside an O'Neill cylinder, you being an individual doing things there that requires you to move around from the edge of the "world" to another continously, like delivering packages and such.

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

ForHackernews

9 hours ago

This is a website, not an O'Neill cylinder, and I can't walk around it.