# Dominoes

> Dominoes: draw a line and it fills with lacquered dominoes that topple in a chain when you let go. A real-time WebGPU experiment by Luis Bizarro.

Lacquered double-six dominoes with engraved, paint-filled pips, a centre bar and a brass spinner stand on a soft paper floor, seen from a high three-quarter angle. A spiral is already toppling when the page opens; when everything has fallen, the line sinks away and the floor lays itself a new pattern: concentric rings, a fan that splits, a serpentine wave, a heart, a snake. Drag to draw: dominoes pop up along the stroke as you draw, and when you let go the first one tips and the line falls in a chain. Click any standing domino to push it, away from you. Each line has one colourway with a calm gradient along it: ivory with black pips, then candy pink, jet with white pips, cobalt, citrus, jade, tangerine and a spectrum. The physics is a real rigid-body solver (extended position-based dynamics with substeps, box contacts sampled along each domino's rounded edges, static and dynamic friction, sleeping), so the dominoes hinge on their edges, slide a little and settle in overlapping shingles. Rendered with soft contact-hardening shadows, ambient occlusion from a blurred height field, a clear-coat lacquer with a softbox reflection, temporal antialiasing and AgX tone mapping. The clacks are CC0 recordings, varied in pitch and level, so a long chain sounds like a rattle running away. M toggles the sound.

- Live: https://dominoes.bizar.ro/ (needs WebGPU: a recent Chrome, Edge or Safari)
- Desktop apps: https://dominoes.bizar.ro/downloads/Dominoes-macOS.zip, https://dominoes.bizar.ro/downloads/Dominoes-Windows.zip, https://dominoes.bizar.ro/downloads/Dominoes-Linux.tar.gz
- Built with: Raw WebGPU and WGSL, TypeScript and Vite; the desktop apps in Rust on wgpu, with the same physics and shaders.
- After: Lily Hevesh (Hevesh5) and the domino toppling community.
- Author: Luis Bizarro, creative technologist and real-time 3D developer for the web

## Author

Luis Bizarro builds real-time 3D for the web with WebGL and WebGPU: shaders, interactive scenes and award-winning creative websites. His work includes Apple, Airbnb, Active Theory, National Design Studio, UNIT9 and independent studios.

- [Portfolio](https://bizar.ro/): every project and experiment
- [Portfolio for agents](https://bizar.ro/llms.txt)
- Contact: luis@bizar.ro