Pokeable · Specimen 003

SoapBubble.

Mostly air.
Barely there.
Handle with a fingertip.

WebGPU · Live

Paused

Tap gently. Press too hard and it pops.

Bubbles1

Film560 nm

Volume100%

Pops0

How it works

The shell is a mesh of 2,562 points on a subdivided icosahedron. Each point slides along its own ray from the bubble’s centre, so the film can dent, stretch and ring but can never fold inside out.
Surface tension pulls every point towards the average of its neighbours while a pressure step holds the trapped air at constant volume. Their tug-of-war, at a fixed 240 Hz step, is what makes it wobble.
Colour is thin-film interference: light bouncing off the inner and outer faces of a film a few hundred nanometres thick cancels some wavelengths and boosts others, computed per pixel over eight wavelengths.
The film is thinner at the top and drains slowly downwards. Touches swirl it and stretching thins it, which is why strained film turns pale, then dark, then pops.
Touching bubbles share a curved wall set by their pressures, with the smaller one bulging in. Merging and splitting rebuild the shell while conserving the air inside.
Every sound is synthesised live with the Web Audio API: swept sines for bloops, filtered noise for air, wind and pops. Nothing is recorded.

Pokeable · Specimen 003 · WebGPU unavailable

This bubble needs WebGPU.

The film is simulated and lit live on your graphics card with WebGPU and WGSL shaders, and this browser isn’t exposing WebGPU right now (it may be unsupported, switched off, or blocked on this device).

Open the page in a recent Chrome or Edge, or Safari 26 or later, on a machine with a supported GPU. There is deliberately no WebGL fallback: a faked bubble isn’t the specimen.