Black Cube Gallery

A Rust-to-WebAssembly, static-site personal digital art gallery. Visitors choose an installation, then enter a WebGL-rendered white room containing a solid black cube.

A World in Light is a room-scale, Earth-like procedural planet. Its shader generates terrain, a Pacific-scale ocean with reflective water, lakes, restrained snow-covered mountain relief, distinct north and south polar glaciers, displaced cloud bodies, atmospheric scattering, and a day/night terminator at render time. The planet's surface is stable while a stationary virtual sun supplies the light and a moon orbits the planet. No texture, model, or network asset is required. The atmosphere is a compact real-time approximation of molecular (Rayleigh-like) blue scattering and aerosol/cloud (Mie-like) forward scattering, not a climate simulation. The Moon and planet also cast geometric directional eclipses on each other; a small amount of Earthshine remains on the Moon during a lunar eclipse.

Click the room or choose Explore room to capture the mouse. Press Escape at any time to release it. Use Full screen to expand the room; the same button changes to Exit full screen when active.

• W, A, S, D: move
• Mouse: look
• Space: jump
• Ctrl: smoothly crouch

Use Controls in the installation to adjust mouse sensitivity, invert vertical mouse look, and rebind every action. Settings are validated and stored only in this browser’s local storage; no visitor data is sent anywhere. The physical room has walls, floor, ceiling, gravity, a solid central cube, and collision-safe movement.

The production browser code is compiled from Rust to WebAssembly with wasm-pack 0.15.0. The repository also needs Cargo with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target, Node.js for the local static server, and GNU Make. No Node package install is required.

make help   # list commands
make build  # compile the static site to dist/
make serve  # build and serve at http://127.0.0.1:8080
make dev    # watch, rebuild, and refresh local browser tabs
make test   # run focused domain tests
make check  # run the final local quality gate
make clean  # remove generated dist/ and target/ directories

Open the local URL in a modern desktop browser. A static-hosting provider can publish the generated dist/ directory directly; no server process is required in production.

make dev is the normal development loop: edit Rust, HTML, CSS, or the Wasm bootstrap; the server coalesces rapid changes, rebuilds dist/, and reloads open local tabs only after a successful build. If a build fails, the last successful site remains available.

Use make test during development and make check before handoff.

1. Add stable metadata and a destination in a new src/artworks/<artwork>.rs module.
2. Register that module in src/artworks/mod.rs, including its explicit ArtworkKind.
3. Add its self-contained WebGL implementation in src/browser/<artwork>_renderer.rs and register its ArtworkKind in src/browser/rendering.rs; visitor controls and persisted preferences must remain untouched.
4. Add focused catalog/destination tests in src/lib.rs; pure rendering math belongs in src/math.rs with deterministic tests.

The catalog, destination resolver, artwork kinds, FPS rules, and rendering math are renderer-independent. Browser DOM construction, local preference storage, and renderer selection are adapter modules. This remains one Cargo crate intentionally: the gallery is one static Wasm application with no reusable deployment boundary yet. Internal modules keep the dependency direction clear without introducing workspace/public-API overhead.

The gallery has no network calls, credentials, user-provided HTML, or third-party assets. The only stored value is validated local control preference data; it contains no identity or secret and can be cleared in browser site settings. A restrictive meta Content Security Policy permits only same-origin assets, same-origin WebAssembly loading, and WebAssembly compilation. Artwork IDs are validated before resolving a destination; assets added later should be validated for size, format, licensing, and safe paths before use.