3 HN users recommended this demo3 months2019–2026score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN people hold it up as a standout modern demo, praising its scene transitions and how it looks on 3D displays.
Intrinsic Gravity is a real-time demoscene production by Still, made with the Tooll tool for Under Construction 2014. It is a black-and-white op-art animation with a soundtrack by hoffman.
“It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another” (HN, 2026)
I've followed the demoscene for nearly three decades, and the demos get put out every year have always been hugely impressive. The old Amiga stuff like Technological Death was great but the more modern demos like Intrinsic Gravity by Still ( [this video] ) are just amazing . You can get pretty far making demo effects in CSS and JS these days. A couple of my attempts over on Codepen; Text flash - [link] (Warning: flashing images) Bitmap text wobble scroller - [link]
That's amazing and I'm now wondering if it influenced the demoscene. In fact I'm specifically thinking of "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still, which has fairly similar concepts going on, especially at the end. It's also one of the best executable demos I've ever seen. [link] [this video]
I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: [this video]
Favourite demo, many scenes transitioning beautifully
> Intrinsic Gravity by Still This one is fun to watch on a 3D display. (As much of it is black & white, anaglyph should also be worth a shot.) Most of the effects could have plausibly been rasterised or blitted into a flat plane; alternatively, all of it could be done in a pixel shader which just colours in two triangles that fill the screen. But (as I discovered to my delight one day when I happened to have access to a Windows machine with a 3D monitor) it's all 3D geometry with a perspective projection. For example, the wibbly-wobbly cone[0], viewed in 2D, could just as well be a flat bunch of sinusoidally gyrating discs all XORed together. But these discs are properly stacked along the Z axis. The demo doesn't natively support stereo displays, so you have to find a tool that can inject itself into the graphics pipeline and modify the projection matrix for each eye. I don't remember which one I used when I tried that, but it had a nifty feature you should seek out: Hotkeys that let you adjust the mapping of depth to the stereoscopic shenanigans (separation and convergence) on the fly. Being able to make such tweaks on a scene-by-scene basis helps a lot with a production that was only designed for cyclops mode originally. The same technique can be applied to many PC demos, but usually it only amplifies a 3D effect that was already there in the first place. In the case of Intrinsic Gravity, it gives you an extra dimension of ' whoa '. Bonus recommendation for those who can't
Demo uses real 3D geometry, works well on stereoscopic displays
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