About this world

What Aetheryn is

Aetheryn is an explorable living painting. A single illustration of an imagined world has been given depth, motion and light so you can travel through it. Rivers flow, falls pour, lava glows, the aurora moves and the air is full of drifting light.

The eight realms follow what the painting shows. Their names and descriptions are written for this experience and describe only what you can see in the picture.

A world that changes

Open Shape the world to find the Aether Dial. Choose dawn, day, dusk or night; turn the canopy through spring, summer, autumn and winter; or let the day and seasons unfold on their own.

Call clear skies, mist, rain, a sun shower, snow or a storm. Clouds roll in over the far sky, rain falls in sheets at different depths and rings the open water, and the stone darkens in the wet and dries again when the sky clears. Snow settles along the ledges and canopies and melts away in warmer seasons. Storms bring lightning forking behind the distant spires, and with sound on, thunder rolls in after each stroke.

At night the stars come out and the moon rises in its phase, a new phase each night across an eight night month, keeping the hours a real moon keeps; the darkest nights hold the most stars. On summer nights the fireflies in the gardens fall into step and flash together. A morning after rain, or a sun shower, can raise a rainbow on the side of the sky opposite the sun. Watch an aurora, a meteor shower or an eclipse whenever you like. These are the imagined conditions of Aetheryn, and your choices stay with you as you travel between its realms.

Take the guided tour to fly through every realm in its best weather, keep any view as a postcard, and read the Field Notes for the real science and myth behind it all.

The pause button holds continuous motion throughout the world. You can still select a different hour or atmosphere while it is paused, and your last chosen settings are remembered in this browser.

How it was made

The illustration was enlarged four times with Real-ESRGAN so the camera can move in close, and measured with the Depth Anything V2 depth model to learn which forms are near and which are far.

Behind every near edge, the LaMa inpainting model painted in what the near forms hide. That hidden layer lets the camera sway much further in depth with clean edges instead of stretched ones, and it let the floating isles and the sailboats be lifted out of the picture so they can drift and rock on their own.

A custom WebGL2 renderer uses that depth to let near forms slide across far ones as the camera moves, and pushes into the scene as it flies between realms. Masks drawn from the painting itself drive the falling water, the flowing rivers, the lava, the aurora, the swaying canopy and the drifting light. Light pours in shafts from the low sun and the crystal core, gathered from the parts of the scene that are not blocked by nearer forms. There are no video files: every movement and every change of weather is computed live in your browser, and close views stream in sharper detail only when you need them.

In Wander, the Lens lets you look through the painting at what it is built from: its depth, what the inpainting filled in behind near forms, the mattes that guide each effect, and the way its rivers and lava flow.

Accessibility

Every realm has ordinary text and links. Use the keyboard to travel, open the atlas or shape the world. The motion control pauses continuous animation; when motion is paused or your system requests reduced motion, navigation changes the view without a camera flight. Sound starts only when you choose it.

Lightning appears only during storms. It never flashes more than twice in any second, and it stops entirely whenever motion is paused or your system asks for reduced motion. The guided tour can be paused, advanced or ended at any time, and the weather it shows lasts only for the tour.

If the living renderer is unavailable, the original painting remains. Its light and color respond to the hour and season, while moving weather and sky events are unavailable in that view. The realm pages and fairy hints still work.

Credits

Real-ESRGAN by Xintao Wang and colleagues, BSD 3 Clause License. Depth Anything V2 Small by Lihe Yang and colleagues, Apache License 2.0. LaMa by Roman Suvorov and colleagues, Apache License 2.0. Typefaces Cormorant SC by Christian Thalmann and Alegreya and Alegreya Sans SC by Huerta Tipográfica, all under the SIL Open Font License.