Space Voyage — a cinematic space screensaver_
Try a current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, or turn on hardware acceleration in the browser settings.
A voyage, not a loop
Keyboard shortcuts
Made for big screens
Guide — a voyage through space in five steps
Everything renders live on your graphics card. No video, no download.
Open the page and it is already flying: a nebula, stars streaming past and, most of the time, a planet growing ahead.
Auto mixes everything; Nebula, Ember, Glacier and Void keep the colours in one family. Keys 1–5.
Speed, star density, nebula strength and how often the ship jumps (15–120 s, or off). Press J to jump right now.
Click the view or press F. The cursor and buttons fade away; move the mouse to bring them back, Esc to leave.
Set Start after idle and leave the tab open: after that many minutes without input it takes over the window. Any key or mouse move wakes it.
What you are looking at
- nebula
- layered noise in two colours, with dark dust lanes
- planet
- gas giant or rocky world, lit by the sector’s sun
- rings
- banded, with the planet’s shadow across them
- sun
- glare and lens-flare ghosts, hidden behind the planet
- spool
- 2 s: stars start to stretch
- jump
- about 3 s of streaks and a blue tunnel
- arrive
- a flash, then a brand-new sector
- F
- full screen
- Space
- pause
- J
- jump now
- 1–5
- region
- ↑ ↓
- speed
- H / S
- HUD / sound
The space voyage screensaver, explained
Space Voyage is a cinematic space screensaver that runs in your browser. You cruise through a sector of space — a coloured nebula, thousands of stars, often a planet with an atmosphere and rings — and every half minute or so the ship spools up, jumps through hyperspace and arrives somewhere new. No two sectors are the same, nothing is a pre-recorded video, and there is nothing to install.
How it is rendered
The whole picture is drawn by one fragment shader on your graphics card, recalculated for every pixel on every frame:
- The nebula is fractal noise (fbm) whose coordinates are bent by a second layer of noise — domain warping — which gives the clouds their swirls. A third noise layer carves out dark dust lanes.
- The stars you fly past live in seven depth layers. Each layer scales up as it comes towards you and fades out as it passes; during a jump each star is drawn as a line segment pointing back to the centre, which is what turns points into streaks.
- The planet is ray-traced: each pixel’s viewing ray is tested against a sphere, the hit point gets a normal, and that normal is lit by the sector’s sun. Gas giants get turbulent bands and a storm; rocky worlds get continents, oceans with a sun glint, ice caps and drifting clouds. A Fresnel term adds the bright atmospheric rim, and a halo glows just outside the edge.
- The rings are a ray–plane intersection with banded noise and a gap, drawn in front of or behind the planet depending on distance, and darkened where the planet’s shadow falls on them.
- Finally a filmic tone map, a vignette and a touch of film grain keep bright stars from clipping and make the frame feel like a camera shot.
What happens in a hyperspace jump
The jump is a small state machine: cruise (the planet slowly grows as you approach), spool (two seconds of stars stretching), jump (full warp: streaks, a blue tunnel, the old sector fading out) and arrive (a white flash and the new sector). The new sector is created halfway through the jump, while the screen is full of streaks, so you never see it swap.
Regions
| Key | Region | Look |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Auto | mixes all regions, changes every jump |
| 2 | Nebula | magenta, violet and teal clouds |
| 3 | Ember | orange and deep-red clouds, warm suns |
| 4 | Glacier | cyan, blue and white, icy planets |
| 5 | Void | near-black space, faint clouds, sharp stars |
Share a sector
Every sector comes from a number. The address bar always shows it as ?sector=…, and Share sector copies that link: whoever opens it starts in exactly the same place, with the same nebula, planet and sun. The sector names and codes in the HUD are made up by the same generator.
Performance and quality
On Auto quality the page watches its own frame rate. If it drops below about 42 frames per second it renders at a lower internal resolution and scales the picture up; when there is headroom again it sharpens back up. Low, Medium and High fix the resolution and the number of noise layers yourself. It needs WebGL, which every current browser has; on battery, laptops may slow animation down to save power.
Using it as a real screensaver
A web page cannot register itself as your operating system’s screensaver, but it can behave like one. Choose Start after idle (1 to 30 minutes) and leave the tab open: when nothing has touched the keyboard or mouse for that long, the voyage fills the window and hides the cursor, and the first key press or mouse move brings the page back — that first input is swallowed so it does not click anything. For a TV or second monitor, open the page there and press F.
Sound
Sound is off until you switch it on. It is synthesised live in the browser: a slow, filtered drone for cruising and a rising rush with a low thump for every jump.
Privacy
The voyage is computed entirely on your device. Your settings (speed, region, toggles) are kept in your browser’s local storage, and nothing you do is uploaded. The page loads its font from Google Fonts and counts visits with cookie-free Simple Analytics.