🌀 Mesmerising

Plots how often a phrase appears across books printed since 1500. Watch a word arrive, peak, and quietly fall out of use.

Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.

Falling blocks rotated onto a hexagon and sped up, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely hard.

Every event on Wikipedia plotted as a dot across fourteen billion years, filterable down to one category at a time.

Rebuilds a photograph out of coloured triangles, with sliders controlling exactly how abstract you want to get.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.

The channel that turned the Backrooms into found footage, shot with unnervingly good camera work and almost no music.

Every key on the keyboard fires a different sound and a matching burst of animation. No two letters look or sound alike.

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.

Travel outwards at light speed while hearing which radio hits have reached each distance, oldest at the far edge.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.

Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.

Official home of the autostereograms from every 1990s shopping centre, with a fresh one each week to go cross-eyed at.

Vintage photographs of shopping centres in their fountains-and-ferns prime, scanned from postcards and other people's family albums.

Kaleidoscopic drawing surface with adjustable mirror counts, so one wobbly line comes back as a symmetrical mandala.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot set as far as the arithmetic allows, with palette controls and no plugin to install.

Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down it.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

A meticulous recreation of the falling green glyphs, with settings for every version of the effect across the films.

Industrial supply catalogue with half a million parts, organised so well that engineers browse it purely for pleasure.

Every part of a wristwatch exploded and animated in sequence, until the escapement finally makes sense.

Around 140 visual phenomena, each with sliders to break the effect and a vision scientist's explanation of why you fell for it.

Long-running blog of illusions and visual puzzles, from classic ambiguous figures to whichever dress the internet is arguing about.

Every train on the Tokyo rail network moving in real time across a 3D map, with the aircraft landing at Haneda thrown in.

A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.

Click a dial-up modem, a Nokia ringtone or a VHS rewinder and remember precisely where you were standing at the time.

The official live stream, which for long stretches is simply Earth turning below the space station.

The live feed from a deep-sea research ship's remote submersible, complete with scientists audibly losing composure over a new sea cucumber.

A vaporwave station running continuously since 2015, wrapped in a desktop you can rearrange while it plays.

Physically modelled sea you can retune — wind speed, swell, choppiness — rendering waves that behave properly.

A cabinet of small physics experiments — cloth, water, ragdolls, particles — built by one developer who simply kept going.

Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.

Screenshots of archived GeoCities pages posted automatically, one after another, as a rolling portrait of the amateur web.

Spin a globe, drop on a city, hear whatever its local radio is playing right now. Works best somewhere you have never been.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

Scroll to unroll an infinite toilet roll and scroll back to wind it up, presented by the artist with a completely straight face.

Every letter on the keyboard fires a sound and a matching shape, and mashing the whole row is the correct way to use it.

Plays YouTube videos with almost no views, which turn out to be mostly a stranger's kitchen and a camera left running.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

Type a phrase and watch every film clip in which somebody says it, cut back to back until the words stop meaning anything.

Photographs of corridors, swimming pools and hotel lobbies with nobody in them, which is far more affecting than that sounds.

Steady feed of new illusions with the comments doing the debunking, which is usually half of the entertainment.

Spin a globe covered in green dots and drop the needle on a live local station anywhere on Earth. The buffering is part of the charm.

One button, one random inhabited spot on Earth in Street View, most of them somewhere nobody would ever have chosen to look.