Universe Window
| Universe Window | |
|---|---|
 The principle: the screen is treated as a window, and the view through it is recomputed for the position of the viewer's eye (schematic) | |
| Developer(s) | Molecular Reality Corporation |
| Initial release | July 2026 |
| Written in | JavaScript (three.js, MediaPipe) |
| Operating system | Web browser with a webcam |
| Type | Head-coupled perspective display |
Universe Window is a web page made by Molecular Reality Corporation that uses the visitor's webcam to track the position of their head and redraws a three-dimensional scene so that the screen behaves like a window into it. Its opening line is "Your screen becomes a window into another world. Move your head to look around." It offers four worlds: The Nursery, a stellar nebula; The Abyss, a deep ocean; The Machine, an alien megastructure; and The Cell, the inside of a living cell furnished with real protein structures.[1]
The page needs no account and stores nothing. A line under its single button, "Enter the Window", says: "All processing happens on your device. Camera images never leave your browser."
Head-coupled perspective
A picture on a flat screen is correct from only one point. The page moves that point to wherever the viewer's eye is. The program treats the physical screen as a rectangle in space with the eye somewhere in front of it, and draws the scene through a viewing pyramid with its apex at the eye and its base on the edges of the screen. When the eye is off center the pyramid is lopsided, an off-axis projection, and when the head moves the camera inside the scene moves with it.[1] Near objects then slide across the screen faster than far ones, as they do through a real window. That relative motion, motion parallax, tells the brain about depth even when only one eye is open.
The code computes the pyramid directly. For a screen of width W and height H and an eye at (x, y, z) from its center, the left edge of the view at the near clipping distance n lies at (−W/2 − x)n/z and the right at (W/2 − x)n/z, and the top and bottom follow from H and y. The graphics library, three.js, normally builds a symmetric pyramid from a field of view and an aspect ratio; the page switches that off and supplies its own matrix on every frame.[1]
The arrangement is called head-coupled perspective, or "fish tank virtual reality", the name used by Colin Ware and colleagues for a head-tracked desktop display in 1993.[2] It became widely known in 2007, when a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, Johnny Chung Lee, published a video in which a Wii Remote, mounted on a television and pointed at infrared lights on a pair of glasses, did the tracking.[3] The effect works for one viewer at a time, and both eyes see the same image.
Tracking
Universe Window finds the face with MediaPipe's face landmarker, which returns a transformation matrix for the head, and converts it to meters relative to the center of the screen. The positions jitter from frame to frame. Each axis is therefore smoothed with a One Euro filter, published in 2012 for noisy pointing devices, which raises its cutoff frequency as the input moves faster, so that a still head stays still and a quick movement gets through. Depth, the coordinate a single camera measures worst, has the lowest cutoff. If the face is lost, the viewpoint drifts back to the center over two seconds.[1][4]
To place the eye, the program needs the screen's physical size. The page carries a table of five MacBook screens, from the 13-inch Air to the 16-inch Pro, with their pixel counts and their widths and heights in meters, and assumes the camera sits 10 mm above the top edge of the screen. Any other display is measured by assuming 220 pixels to the inch on high-density screens and 96 on others, and a visitor can enter the dimensions by hand.[1] Comments in the code record four bugs fixed on the way: "camera MOVES", "all units in meters", the coordinate convention of MediaPipe's matrices, and the fact that a browser reports the screen in CSS pixels, which "must multiply by devicePixelRatio".
Keys W, A, S and D fly a ship through each world, the arrow keys turn it, and C engages a cruise autopilot. G shows a debug display of the tracked eye position in millimeters, and H shows help.
Worlds
The Nursery
A stellar nursery, the cloud of gas and dust in which stars form. Simplex noise shapes the nebula, and the world holds 8,000 stars, 2,000 grains of dust, 40 asteroids and a comet.[1]
The Abyss
A bioluminescent deep ocean. Exponential fog limits the view, 3,000 flakes of marine snow fall through it, 24 jellyfish pulse with a glow along the rims of their bells, and 80 strands of kelp and a school of 200 fish fill the middle distance. One to two minutes after arrival a Leviathan crosses the scene, recognizable by the cyan glint of its eye.[1] In the real ocean, marine snow is the slow fall of dead plankton, fecal pellets and other debris that feeds the animals of the deep.
The Machine
An infinite alien megastructure: a grid of 31 by 31 positions spaced 25 m apart, each holding a structural module 4 m across with glowing window panels, joined by beams of energy and patrolled by 30 drones. A Core stands 600 m away.[1]
The Cell
A fly-through inside a living cell 80 m in radius, with a nucleus marked by eight nuclear pores, 25 vesicles and 4,000 drifting particles. Five real structures from the Protein Data Bank float in it, drawn atom by atom in the conventional CPK colors at a scale of one ångström to ten centimeters, a magnification of a billion.[1]
| PDB entry | Structure | Atoms drawn | Size in the Cell |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1EJ6 | Reovirus core | 17,480 | 22 m |
| 11YE | Mouse Piezo1 channel, curved, in membrane vesicles | 16,020 | 20 m |
| 1FKA | Small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus | 5,078 | 18 m |
| 10OP | Sudan ebolavirus glycoprotein bound by three neutralizing antibodies | 12,279 | 14 m |
| 106M | Sperm whale myoglobin, a mutant carrying ethyl isocyanide | 1,424 | 4.8 m |
Clicking a protein "shoots" it. It tumbles, and a card headed "Protein Identified" gives its name, organism, PDB code, atoms, bonds, size and radius. Of the five, the three with the most atoms are drawn without bonds, and their cards report 0.[1]
Drawn at the same scale as its proteins, the Cell would be 160 nm across, smaller than most bacteria. Its proteins come from the same pipeline that supplies the monsters of the company's game Moleculoids, which fetches structures from the RCSB Protein Data Bank and prepares them for drawing.[5]
Development
The page's files are dated July 11 to 14, 2026; the Machine was last changed on July 13 and the Cell on July 14.[5] It belongs to a group of visual pages the company published that month, with Iridian, a gallery of 197 animated eyes that opened on July 24, and /red, a generative world in shades of red built on July 23. The eye is the company's emblem, The Seeing Eye, for its claim that while others build "the brain" of artificial intelligence it builds "the eye", instruments that see molecules. Universe Window points a camera at the visitor's face and moves the view to follow their eyes.
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Universe Window". Molecular Reality Corporation. July 2026.
- ^ Ware, C. (1993). "Fish tank virtual reality". pp. 37-42. doi:10.1145/169059.169066.
- ^ Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote (Video). 2007.
- ^ "1€ filter: a simple speed-based low-pass filter for noisy input in interactive systems". 2012. pp. 2527-2530.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. July 2026.