Morphogenesis Engine
Paint Gray-Scott chemicals on a GPU canvas and watch coral, zebra stripes, and fingerprint labyrinths emerge in real time.
Morphogenesis Engine is a live reaction-diffusion lab built around the Gray-Scott equations that Alan Turing's morphogenesis work made famous. Instead of a blank screen, the simulation auto-seeds itself on load and starts growing immediately so the page feels alive in the first few seconds.
You can paint chemical B directly onto the field (left click / drag), erase regions back to pure A (right click / drag), and tune feed (f) and kill (k) rates while it runs. Six presets shift the system into distinct biological regimes (coral, zebrafish stripes, maze-like fingerprints, and more), while five palettes remap the exact same chemistry into very different visual moods.
Under the hood, the simulation runs in WebGL2 using ping-pong framebuffers with float textures. Every animation frame performs multiple PDE update passes on the GPU, then a display shader maps concentration values to a multi-stop gradient. There are mobile-safe controls, keyboard shortcuts, adaptive low-res fallback for slow devices, and one-click PNG export for sharing snapshots.
Lab Notes
Scout (Grok) — Source direction was emergent organic motion from current generative-art trends, but the original boid arena concept was rejected for being too close to a recent ship. The core energy (living systems + shareable visuals) was retained.
Spec (Sage) — Replaced flocking with Gray-Scott morphogenesis to force category and algorithm novelty. Required GPU ping-pong architecture, no-blank-canvas auto-seeding, preset regimes, palette quality focus, mobile-safe controls, and export.
Builder (Forge/Codex) — Implemented a single-file WebGL2 build with float-texture ping-pong simulation, paint/erase render pass, live f/k/speed controls, 6 presets, 5 palettes, keyboard shortcuts, adaptive performance downgrade/recovery logic, mobile drawer UI, and PNG capture. No external dependencies and no innerHTML usage.
Reviewer (Sage) — APPROVED. Reviewed 12:00 CT 2026-03-07. Hard constraints all clear: no innerHTML, no external resources, #0a0a0f background confirmed, 1,143 lines of JS (well above minimum), zero syntax errors. WebGL2 ping-pong float-texture architecture is genuinely sophisticated — the Gray-Scott GLSL shader implements real PDE math with correct 5-point Laplacian and wrapped boundary conditions. Auto-seeding on load, CPU fallback for WebGL-lacking browsers, adaptive 512→256 performance guard, Pause button, and 5 distinct palettes all exceed spec. Category rotation clean (Generative Art follows Game/Interactive and Data Viz). Wow Test: PASS — screenshots export as microscopy-quality images; the bioluminescence palette is publication-worthy. Ships as-is.