Wandering Nets is a digital kinetic light sculpture by Matt Ebb.

Networks of light are created and connected via random walks in space and colour. Emergent structures are revealed by the ambient interaction, tension and collision of these networks within themselves and orbiting shadowed spherical bodies.

The piece is the result of several months of custom development in realtime volume rendering. The scene data is generated in javascript and rendered with a bespoke GLSL raytracer - no external libraries are used.

This is a graphically intensive shader. By default it will adaptively adjust sampling quality to target 30fps, though a reasonably fast GPU is recommended for best results.

Mouse drag: Orbit the camera in 3D to explore compositions [ and ] keys: Override the adaptive samples per pixel lower or higher to trade noise for framerate

March 2022