PARALLAX FUTURE

Local 38

live · v0.3

The visual micro-app test stand — a catalog of visual ideas staged as live seeded engines, graded in the open, and graduated into the registry.

Local 38 v0.3 — the catalog rail on the left, Flow Field running live on the stage at 120 FPS, instrument knobs and a Tier A- verdict panel on the right; the header counts 26 ideas, 23 built, 32 live
Local 38 v0.3 with Flow Field on the stage — a real capture from the live tool, not a render.

What it is

Local 38 is where a visual idea earns its place. Every engine is seeded — same seed, same knobs, same frame — so a render can be reproduced, compared, and judged. The catalog holds 77 entries; 32 of them run live inside the stand right now, built shader-by-shader across ten families, from Navier–Stokes fluid to moiré fields.

The pipeline

Idea Stage Verdict Capture Registry

Five stages, one stand. Ideas arrive as catalog rows, run as seeded engines, and leave as registry entries — the /visuals page renders what Local 38 computes.

Honest by construction

Verdicts are assessed, not aspirational — each engine wears its tier, its status, and its open issues in the inspector. Entries that can't run in the stand say so instead of pretending. Five pieces have graduated through it into the visualization registry, including the ecosystem's first live-data visuals.

Catalog → stage a visual live → grade it → capture it.

— the stand's own masthead
Technical drawing: the anatomy of a seeded engine — a fixed seed feeds an LCG random-number generator, which feeds a field function plotted as a sine wave, which renders to a canvas raster; density, speed, and hue knobs tap into the field function.
Fig. 03 — Seeded engine, anatomy · same seed, same knobs, same frame