Sprialator

An Accidental Beginning

I began writing Sprialator after buying a projector for my home. Around the same time, I was learning a guitar cover of Pure Imagination. I had the idea to film a video from inside the guitar—something I occasionally do—and wanted a slowly rotating spiral projected behind me as a backdrop.

Rather than playing a pre-rendered video, I wanted the spiral to be generated live. I asked ChatGPT how to draw a rotating spiral on a canvas, got a small piece of starter code, misspelled my github repository, and the project sprialed outward from there.

The funny part is that when I finally got Sprialator to a place that felt “good enough” to film, I discovered that the very specific camera settings needed to produce a rolling-shutter effect didn’t play nicely with the projector at all.

At that point, I had a project without a use. Instead of abandoning it, I decided to see if it could live somewhere else—and submitted it as an art piece to SOAK, my region’s local Burning Man festival.

What's Interesting Here

Sprialator ended up being a learning project in several unexpected directions.

Learning SVGs properly

This project forced me to actually understand SVGs rather than treating them as opaque assets. I spent a lot of time normalizing fundamental shapes—circles, stars, polygons—so they all shared a common scale and structure. That constraint ended up being essential for everything that followed.

SVG morphing without jump cuts

One thing I really wanted to avoid was the visual “jump” that happens when one shape abruptly becomes another. Smoothly morphing one SVG into the next turned out to be a surprisingly difficult problem. Especially without visual jump cuts. I explored several libraries that promised to handle it, but none quite fit what I needed.

In the end, I hacked together a solution by using an existing morphing library in an unintended way—pre-generating the transitional forms between shapes ahead of time, then animating through those intermediate states. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked, and it taught me a lot about where abstraction helps and where it gets in the way.

Leaving the browser

When Sprialator was installed at SOAK, it became my first real foray into programming a microcontroller. The project crossed a boundary from “something that lives on a screen” into something physical and interactive, which was both intimidating and deeply satisfying. It’s a direction I’m very much looking forward to exploring again.