K/L KALKOWSKI LAB
INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS & EXPERIMENTS
FIELD NOTES / 001 PRIVATE PREVIEW

Good ideas
get their
hands dirty.

Step inside Christopher Kalkowski’s working portfolio. Systems, research, hardware and a few experiments that escaped the bench.

Single player. No app account. Desktop, touch or gamepad.
Headset and Cardboard support depends on your browser and hardware.

RESEARCH INDEX

Find your experiment.

Descriptions sourced from chriskalkowski.com. Exhibits are illustrative. The math station runs a synthetic Gaussian/BH calculation locally; the Swarmcord agents are animated workflow representations.

Read project story ↗

Your way through.

Desktop

WASD or arrow keys to move. Hold Shift to sprint. Drag to look, or enable mouse lock. E inspects a nearby exhibit. Escape releases the mouse or closes a panel.

Phone & gamepad

Touch arrows move; drag the view to look. A standard Bluetooth gamepad uses the left stick to move (press L3 to sprint), right stick to turn, A to inspect and B to close. Pair it through your device settings first.

Headset VR

Available only when your browser reports immersive VR support. Point a controller at the floor and press its trigger to teleport. Use the right stick for snap turning. Project plaques are visible in VR; exit VR to read full stories.

Experimental Cardboard

Landscape split-screen with optional phone orientation and gamepad input. This is not a universal headset compatibility claim. Viewer optics vary; adjust eye separation below. A passive Cardboard viewer is not itself a gamepad. Stop if you feel discomfort.

No camera, microphone, analytics or uploads. Optional tab sharing analyzes audio locally; optional YouTube playback contacts Google only after you load a video. Orientation is requested only when entering phone VR. Headset and phone fit must be physically tested.

Club media & shader board

Effects appear on both club display panels. Close this board to watch them in the lab; audio keeps playing until stopped. Exit immersive VR to use these desktop/touch controls.

Audio-reactive source

Audio diagnostics ready.

Tab capture is optional and browser-dependent. Choose a browser tab and enable its audio. No microphone access. Shared video is not processed; nothing is recorded or uploaded. The browser always asks you to choose what to share.

Shader controls

GPU preview starts when this board opens.

Original lightweight browser effects; no June, Mochie or VRSL code. Reduced motion disables them. Audio controls view-effect intensity. Desktop and phone stereo use camera post-processing. Headset WebXR currently keeps its native undistorted view.

Original effect stack

Up to six ordered camera distortions sample the rendered scene. The small board preview shows the corresponding surface pattern, not the camera image. Echo uses shifted scene samples, not historical frames. Blend selection currently applies to the optional surface preview.

No strobe or forced camera motion. Random presets respect reduced motion. Stop immediately if uncomfortable. Stylized beams do not cast real-time shadows.

A virtual camera inside this lab only. Desktop uses a fixed corner viewpoint; headset and phone VR retain head tracking and show a virtual monitor.

YouTube

Loading contacts YouTube/Google and is subject to their privacy policy. Nothing loads before you click. Playback is not automatically connected to effects: use the explicit tab-audio share above. Embedded playback availability depends on the video and browser.

No audio source or YouTube player loaded.