IMO the most realistic generated psychedelic images were made by Google's Deep Dream 10 years ago. It seems like it's been mostly forgotten about after the advent of DALL-E, Midjourney, etc.
Eh a lot of that ‘deep dreamy’ stuff ends up looking so same-same - I don’t need to look at endless various of ‘dog faces and insect body parts and glittering gemstones’ you know? I want to see actual weird stuff, bizarre genometry, a sense of space that’s mind-bending. Maximalism is not the be all end all of trippy visuals.
The AI generated ones are getting really good nowadays.
jstanley 326 days ago [-]
It would be cool to have something like the first one, except generated in realtime and you get to "steer".
If it works by zooming in slightly each frame and then asking the AI to refine the image to better match the prompt or whatever, we could steer through the world by changing the centre of zoom.
If generating frames is fast enough it could feel like flying a spaceship through a psychedelic environment.
DrSiemer 326 days ago [-]
Deforum stuff is cool, but also a bit of a flash in the pan because of the disconnected nature of the generated frames.
Pure video generation is getting better, but like all generative AI it lacks imagination and cannot really create new things, making it less qualified for truly mindblowing psychedelic visuals in its current state.
evanjrowley 326 days ago [-]
I understand your point. There's "trippy visuals" and then there's "that's what I saw when the DMT hit" - My comment was really leaning towards the latter.
duskwuff 326 days ago [-]
I believe this music video (Röyksopp - Impossible) was created with something along those lines:
Eh, it's close but misses the mark if we're specifically trying to match psychedelic visuals. If it were more fractally and geometric sure, but the dogs and fish and shit just isn't it.
Seems closer to representing the experience, but probably less interesting for enhancing the experience.
ddmf 317 days ago [-]
made me wonder if the brain works in a similar way converting the incoming eye information into what the brain "sees" - it's just pattern matching based on what has been seen before and showing the best fit - psychadelics disrupt that.
muzani 326 days ago [-]
I kind of miss the early AI days, where the AI felt closer to my subconscious than me.
taopai 326 days ago [-]
I recall experiencing an incredibly fast hallucination with my eyes closed—like tiny dots moving at an extreme speed.
Faster than anything I had ever seen, almost like an intense vibration, beyond the refresh rate of the eye. It was both intimidating and exhilarating.
Perhaps screens are unable to replicate this type of hallucination.
The animations on this website are impressive. However, in my experience, closed-eye visuals tend to have a central focal point, along with folding or tunnel-like movements and recurring patterns.
I feel deeply grateful for having had some psychedelic experiences, even though hallucinations are the least interesting aspect of them. For me, they acted as a magnifying glass for my overall state of being—allowing me to step outside myself and honestly assess how I feel. They also foster a deeper appreciation for nature.
It would be fascinating to have this discussion within this community. These substances are often demonized due to a lack of understanding, yet they can have a profound impact. For instance, after taking a small dose of LSD, I completely lost interest in alcohol. In the past six months, I’ve only had three nights of drinking, lost a significant amount of weight, and feel fantastic.
kermit___ 326 days ago [-]
Like any mind-altering substance, I would suggest caution. Bad decisions are made and dangerous thoughts are had. Relationships can end, lives can be ruined, and people can die. It’s not a hallucinagen-specific problem, but here be dragons.
taopai 318 days ago [-]
Like driving a car.
mgraczyk 326 days ago [-]
Very cool animations, but they don't strike me as "psychedelic". A bit too smooth and unstructured.
evo_9 326 days ago [-]
Very similar to my favorite trip toy of the 90s… rock ‘star’ Todd Rundgren’s Flowfazer. Quite mesmerizing for toddlers, too.
I've heard this music somewhere before.... Telefon Tel Aviv I think? why isn't it credited?
getToTheChopin 326 days ago [-]
Sorry about that -- yes it was an oversight on my part.
I had included this small credit in the commentary on the website: "The song used is Fahrenheit Fair Enough by Telefon Tel Aviv."
This isn't enough -- I've pushed a changed showing a song credit at the bottom-left of the canvas that appears when you first load the page.
I also added a song credit in the github readme.
Telefon Tel Aviv is one of my favourite bands, I hope they get more listeners!
garbagewoman 326 days ago [-]
Looks to be a demo of the repo, the visualisation along with “Telefon Tel Aviv” isn’t the product - in that light it probably isn’t credited due to a minor oversight
locusofself 326 days ago [-]
such an amazing track though, I use this to test every new speaker / headphones I've had for like 20 years running.
typeofhuman 326 days ago [-]
Cool. But this literally crashed my phone. I've never seen anything like it. Was impressed really. Little nervous. But it locked my Brave browser first then it locked my entire phone. System UI and Android crashed. It recovered but wow. What a trip.
Aside from shadertoy I use https://glslsandbox.com/ (for some reason it has https errors now). It's the same concept and it has a lot of submissions that are more basic than shardertoy where you can easily change lines and see what happens.
My intuition for these kind of shaders: They are just pure functions mapping an x,y coordinate to a color (optionally making use of time and cursor position). From this you can derive anything, like drawing a circle by choosing black or white depending on the distance from the center. There is a lot of intuition to gain and it's fun playing around, because as long as it compiles you will see something and you are likely to be surprised about what you accidentally made. Very rewarding.
Distilitron 326 days ago [-]
Telefon tel aviv is nice, gfx is crap
nimzoLarsen 330 days ago [-]
This is so beautiful! The outputs are trippy and the music fits well.
Nice work
qwertox 326 days ago [-]
I think AI tools like Stable Diffusion have a big potential.
Something along the lines of what Nexxus 604 is doing.
That is freaking awesome. Why isn't it better known?
spot 326 days ago [-]
couldn't agree more :)
he is not alone :)
talles 326 days ago [-]
I miss Winamp
DrSiemer 326 days ago [-]
It will never as glorious as it was back in the day, but Milkdrop 3 was released in 2023 and works on any audio on your system.
01100011 326 days ago [-]
Is it cross platform?
Best thing about milkdrop was that you could use a microphone. We brought a projector and screen to a music festival (HSMF) in '04 and had a jam circle in our camp where the visualizations would respond to the music we were making. Definitely a hit way back when before that sort of stuff became boring.
ferociouskite56 326 days ago [-]
On Android the free ProjectM app hasn't been updated since 2022. Does anyone know how to install Milkdrop 3 on Kodi for Raspberry Pi or in F-Droid? Kodi is also on Android.
As a teenager I used to fiddle with the visualization editor for hours.
Good fun!
w_for_wumbo 326 days ago [-]
I love these projects, I've been really passionate about including our own sensory inputs into the experience, whether it's voice, webcam input or (in the future health metrics) in order to tailor the experience to the experiencers' desires.
Thank you for reminding me about Telefon Tel Aviv.
deadbabe 326 days ago [-]
this gave me an overwhelming sense of melancholy
locusofself 326 days ago [-]
The music is Telefon Tel Aviv , first track from their first album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough. Absolute masterpiece of electronic music.
bowsamic 326 days ago [-]
Why?
deadbabe 326 days ago [-]
The pattern and music I got felt like waking up on a groggy Saturday morning, as a very young child in the 90s, with not a care in the world and in a world where things were generally going pretty good. Any moment you expect your youthful mom to call you down for breakfast, to eat colorful cereal with siblings and watch bright funny cartoons, before going outside to act out adventures in the yard, and wow it feels like so much time goes by but then it’s just 10 AM, the day seems to take forever.
bomewish 326 days ago [-]
Presumably nostalgia —- I’m certainly feeling it!
dalemhurley 326 days ago [-]
I love it, it would be awesome if the controls could slowly and randomly adjust themselves so over time the images transition.
DrSiemer 326 days ago [-]
Any way to lerp transitions like Milkdrop does?
getToTheChopin 326 days ago [-]
Not right now unfortunately, but I'll try to add this
j_san 326 days ago [-]
Is there a way to make it loop? (So that one only needs to record e.g. 20 seconds, after which it loops to save space)
getToTheChopin 326 days ago [-]
You can't do a loop right now, but I'll try to add that. Would be very cool
newman8r 326 days ago [-]
So cool! Would love to be able to easily make it full screen (maybe I'm missing the button for that)
Bookmarked
getToTheChopin 326 days ago [-]
Thank you! Right now you can open the controls at the top-right and then adjust the width / height of the canvas.
I'll try to make it easier with a single click
nosmokewhereiam 326 days ago [-]
"...90's techno / Rave Posters..."
This project speaks to me, thank you thank you thank you!
andyjohnson0 326 days ago [-]
This is really nicely done. Kudos.
dole 326 days ago [-]
been tumbling down the old Cthugha and Milkdrop visualization rabbit hole recently, nice gfx and aesthetics on yours and it's always nice to see a fresh take on code
grahamj 326 days ago [-]
ah this takes me back. Thanks ;)
brcmthrowaway 326 days ago [-]
Do not take drugs! its bad for you
lscdjlsdkf 326 days ago [-]
this is not true. Drugs can help
lscdjlsdkf 326 days ago [-]
Personally, i don't like them at all. This grainy feel with a lot of dark/black colors etc. i would not use this while tripping.
lscdjlsdkf 326 days ago [-]
Why does a personal opinion gets downvoted?
I would not use this visualization when i trip. If the OP is interested in a more indepth i would provide it but otherwise, its a product which is directly correlated to a personal experience.
Rendered at 06:20:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Here’s an example I generated in 2015:
https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/drea...
Source image: https://www.wandereurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/mars...
And this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3ZQOzyquo&t=385s
The AI generated ones are getting really good nowadays.
If it works by zooming in slightly each frame and then asking the AI to refine the image to better match the prompt or whatever, we could steer through the world by changing the centre of zoom.
If generating frames is fast enough it could feel like flying a spaceship through a psychedelic environment.
Pure video generation is getting better, but like all generative AI it lacks imagination and cannot really create new things, making it less qualified for truly mindblowing psychedelic visuals in its current state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljnxZypkjn0
This is pretty bang on for a high dose - https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BALFNVBS20
Or this: https://www.instagram.com/share/reel/BBumGiQdP6
Faster than anything I had ever seen, almost like an intense vibration, beyond the refresh rate of the eye. It was both intimidating and exhilarating.
Perhaps screens are unable to replicate this type of hallucination.
The animations on this website are impressive. However, in my experience, closed-eye visuals tend to have a central focal point, along with folding or tunnel-like movements and recurring patterns.
I feel deeply grateful for having had some psychedelic experiences, even though hallucinations are the least interesting aspect of them. For me, they acted as a magnifying glass for my overall state of being—allowing me to step outside myself and honestly assess how I feel. They also foster a deeper appreciation for nature.
It would be fascinating to have this discussion within this community. These substances are often demonized due to a lack of understanding, yet they can have a profound impact. For instance, after taking a small dose of LSD, I completely lost interest in alcohol. In the past six months, I’ve only had three nights of drinking, lost a significant amount of weight, and feel fantastic.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowfazer/id507935335
I had included this small credit in the commentary on the website: "The song used is Fahrenheit Fair Enough by Telefon Tel Aviv."
This isn't enough -- I've pushed a changed showing a song credit at the bottom-left of the canvas that appears when you first load the page.
I also added a song credit in the github readme.
Telefon Tel Aviv is one of my favourite bands, I hope they get more listeners!
Aside from shadertoy I use https://glslsandbox.com/ (for some reason it has https errors now). It's the same concept and it has a lot of submissions that are more basic than shardertoy where you can easily change lines and see what happens.
My intuition for these kind of shaders: They are just pure functions mapping an x,y coordinate to a color (optionally making use of time and cursor position). From this you can derive anything, like drawing a circle by choosing black or white depending on the distance from the center. There is a lot of intuition to gain and it's fun playing around, because as long as it compiles you will see something and you are likely to be surprised about what you accidentally made. Very rewarding.
Nice work
Something along the lines of what Nexxus 604 is doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6m3OvB819s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s_Dtl1U9wU
Best thing about milkdrop was that you could use a microphone. We brought a projector and screen to a music festival (HSMF) in '04 and had a jam circle in our camp where the visualizations would respond to the music we were making. Definitely a hit way back when before that sort of stuff became boring.
Such a cool and influential musician.
As a teenager I used to fiddle with the visualization editor for hours. Good fun!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
Bookmarked
I'll try to make it easier with a single click
This project speaks to me, thank you thank you thank you!
I would not use this visualization when i trip. If the OP is interested in a more indepth i would provide it but otherwise, its a product which is directly correlated to a personal experience.