AI, Knowledge and Personal Computing
Time Vortex
Calendar days laid out on a 3D helix you orbit through, instead of a list you scroll.
Research prototype exploring calendar events as a navigable 3D helical "time vortex", each day a point in time-space you scroll or orbit through. Built as a browser library to test the concept, with the layout math kept independent of the renderer so alternative layouts stay cheap to try.
Highlights
- Pure-function helix layout core (dayPosition()) decoupled from Three.js, so it's independently testable and reusable across layout experiments
- Config-diff renderer splits updates into an immediate tier and a debounced 150ms tier specifically to prevent thrashing expensive text-geometry allocation during rapid UI drags
- Clean subsystem decomposition (DotLayer, TodayMarker, EventCardLayer, ArenaEnvironment), each owning one scene slice and only the config fields it needs
- Three.js kept as a peer dependency (not bundled) to avoid version conflicts for consumers; calendar parsing pushed to optional adapter packages to keep the core bundle lean
Details
- Role
- Design direction (AI-executed build)
- Built with
- TypeScriptThree.jsVitepnpmVitest