Voice Orb

a voice assistant's orb, drawn by one fragment shader: hold it to talk and it listens, let go and it thinks, then it answers. a tap pokes it, and a tap while it answers cuts it off.

key insight: the inside is a sphere of domain-warped noise, sampled at (q, sqrt(1 - |q|^2)) for each point q on the disc, so the flow bunches toward the rim the way a texture on a ball does. the rim wobbles by how loud the orb is, and every phase is a palette rather than a branch in the shader.

the reply is a list of syllables grouped into words and sentences, and the orb swells with each one, so it reads as talking rather than pulsing. moving while you hold is talking louder.