Nebula Drift
an endless drift through a nebula

What you see on every new tab

Nebula Drift carries the New Tab page slowly forward through a cloud of gas and dust, passing roughly one large billow every five seconds, with a gentle sway from side to side and a slight roll. Because the cloud is a real 3D volume, nearby wisps slide past and leave the frame while distant clumps hang and slowly grow.

The dust is rose, violet and cobalt, folded into sheets and filaments with near-black voids between them, and it is lit from inside by glowing knots of peach-white, coral, blue-white and hot pink.

• Glowing cores: A pair of lumpy lit knots appears roughly every ten seconds of flight, set off to the sides so the camera never flies through one.
• Clear corridor: Dust thins out around the flight path and fades in just ahead of the camera, so the view is rarely buried.
• Shaded billows: Each billow has a lit face and a shadowed side, and thin gas in front of a core glows at its rim.
• Stars: Three layers of pinprick stars show through the gaps, the brightest with a faint four-point cross.
• Motes: 140 small warm and cool sparks drift past in front, fading in from the distance and out as they pass.

One fragment shader ray-marches the volume in up to 72 steps per pixel, reading its density from a small noise texture so each layer of detail costs one lookup. Each frame is blended with the last, re-projected along the flight path, to smooth the grain.

What it reacts to

• Mouse: The camera steers up to about five degrees toward the cursor and drifts back to the centre when the cursor leaves.
• Music: With music sync on, bass brightens every glowing core, rising and settling with the low end.
• Beat: A hard kick lifts the brightness of the whole scene for an instant; it fades in under half a second.
• Night: After dusk on Auto, or in Night mode, a dark veil of up to 60 percent sinks the voids further toward black.

Free or Pro?Pro

Ambient New Tab is free to install, with five free themes. Nebula Drift is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Nebula Drift full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.

How to get it

1. Add Ambient New Tab to Chrome.
2. Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
3. Pick Nebula Drift. Done.

Questions

Does the flight ever come back round?

The cloud is a repeating field, so after about 53 minutes of flying the camera reaches the same stretch of nebula again and carries on without a visible seam. The sway, heading wander and roll run on their own cycles, so the view is not an exact replay of the first pass.

Is Nebula Drift free?

It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released.

What lights the nebula?

Glowing knots placed along the flight path, two every ten seconds or so, plus a soft violet glow in the dust itself and a distant key light from above. At each step of the march the shader takes one shadow sample toward the brightest knot and the key light, which shades the far side of each billow.

Does the ray march adapt to a slower graphics chip?

Yes. It starts at full screen resolution with 72 steps per pixel. If frames keep arriving slower than about 27 per second for a couple of seconds, it cuts the internal resolution and step count by a fifth and upscales with a light sharpen. It can do this up to four times and never steps back up.

Does it work on my phone?

No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.

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