Warp Speed Starfield renders the iconic hyperspace tunnel effect entirely in a GLSL fragment shader running on your GPU. Thousands of stars are distributed across 18 radial rings; each one flies outward from the centre, leaving a bright streak behind it. The further a star sits from the centre, the faster it sweeps past — a faithful reproduction of the radial parallax illusion that makes you feel you are hurtling through space at multiples of the speed of light. Drag the sliders to feel the difference between a gentle 0.5×c cruise and a full 10×c warp blast, or hit Hyperspace Jump! for a 2.5-second surge to 40×c above your current speed.
At warp speed, space compression causes stars ahead to appear to streak radially outward. The shader models this with per-star angular positions and an animated radius that grows with time, scaled by warp factor. Streak length grows with both speed and the star's distance from centre, just as perspective and relativistic aberration would predict.
Use Warp speed (0.1 – 10×c) to set cruise velocity. Star density controls how many of the ~16 000 star cells are populated. Streak length lengthens or shortens the motion-blur trails. Pick a Colour theme — Blue-white for a realistic stellar palette, Nebula for vivid spectrum chaos, Gold for a warm retro look. Press Hyperspace Jump! to trigger a 2.5 s burst that peaks at warp+40.
At warp speeds above ~3×c the shader adds chromatic aberration: the red channel stretches slightly outward while the blue channel contracts, mimicking the Doppler blueshift and redshift a relativistic observer would see. It is subtle at warp 3 but vivid at warp 10 — watch the star tips for a coloured fringe.
The visual is inspired by relativistic effects but is an artistic approximation, not a rigorous physics engine. In reality, travelling near light speed would cause extreme Doppler blueshift (stars ahead appear blue and compressed toward the bow) and Lorentz aberration. The simulation captures the essential feel — radial streaking, central glow, chromatic fringing at high warp — while running in real time in a browser shader. Think of it as physically motivated, not physically exact.
Warp speed sets how fast stars fly outward; higher values also increase streak length automatically because the shader multiplies streak length by effectiveWarp. Star density scales the number of occupied grid cells from roughly 1 600 (10 %) to 16 000 (100 %). Streak length is a direct multiplier on the trail behind each star. Colour theme switches the palette: Blue is cool stellar blue-white, White is neutral luminance, Nebula assigns each star a full-spectrum hue, Gold gives warm amber tones.
Pressing Hyperspace Jump! triggers a 2.5-second boost envelope that ramps up over the first 0.75 s, holds at peak for 1 s, then ramps back down. At peak, the shader adds 40×c on top of your current warp setting — so at default warp 3 the effective speed hits 43×c. The button is disabled while the jump is active to prevent stacking, and the Stats panel shows the live effective speed during the jump.
Yes — it uses a Three.js WebGL renderer with a custom GLSL fragment shader. Any modern smartphone or laptop with a GPU that supports WebGL 1.0 (virtually all devices made after 2012) will run it smoothly. The pixel ratio is capped at 1.5× to keep frame rates high on high-DPI displays. If the canvas appears blank, your browser may have WebGL disabled — check about:config (Firefox) or chrome://flags (Chrome) to enable hardware acceleration.
The shader smoothly fades each star's brightness to zero when its screen radius is below 0.15 units. This prevents a distracting "pop" as stars are born at the vanishing point. In the hyperspace narrative, you can think of it as stars emerging from the warp tunnel's event horizon — materialising out of the bright central glow as you accelerate past them.