Hero culture
A small neural culture you can fire and plant a cell in.
Anatomy
| Culture | cell bodies with tapering dendrite trees, axons that wander to their nearest neighbours, a cell born or starved every few seconds |
|---|---|
| Pulses | dense grain running down the axons; the cell they reach blooms and sometimes fires in turn |
| thresholded against the Bayer matrix at ≈2px, in --tissue on the paper | |
| Tap | fires the nearest cell, with a disc of --state grain 36px across where it landed, thinning away over 750ms |
| Hold | a --state seed at 220ms, planted at 620ms: it grows at twice the culture’s rate, wires to its two nearest neighbours and fires |
| Arrival | every cell wakes by its distance from where the cascade fired, over 0.9s |
| Cost | about 75ms of main thread a second at 1440 while in view, nothing off screen; the sway redraws every 300ms, firing blooms at 30fps |
| Reduced motion | starts grown and still; no luminance |
From src/lib/exposure/neurons.ts and the guide’s Motion §3.
Decisions
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Stationary and 2D
No camera drift, parallax, depth layers or lit 3D bodies: a version with relit specimen sprites read as bubbly and rigid.
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The name overlays it
Fibres run straight behind the type and fade towards the paper near it. Routing round the letters traced them; fading the whole field greyed the culture.
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Luminance
A tap answers with a disc of --state grain, so a touch reads as having landed somewhere; a firing alone, often a cell some way off, didn’t show it (Oct 2026).
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Planting
The first thing a visitor can do to the culture leaves a mark of their own, rather than only setting off a firing that fades (Oct 2026).
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Replaced Ambience
The sine field behind a 50% scrim that the hero used until Oct 2026, because it read as generic.