An interactive iPad experience that proves creativity lives in the mind, not the hands
Metal Student Challenge 2026
An interactive experience where you create botanical art through progressively constrained input. You start with full strokes, then sparse taps, and discover that the algorithm transforms minimal input into equal beauty. The less you give it, the more it contributes, and the result is still beautiful
It's about everyone who ever believed they're "not creative enough". The skill ceiling drops, but the creative ceiling doesn't. Orpheus doesn't explain this. It puts you inside it, and by the time words arrive, the conclusion is already yours
Everything lives on the GPU. Swift is the backbone. Metal is where the art happens
The entire rendering pipeline is signed distance fields. No imported assets anywhere. The butterfly, the pencil, the magnifying glass, the golden orb, every letter of text. All pure mathematics evaluated per pixel per frame. Objects breathe, deform, cast real shadows and respond to touch because they're being born every frame, not sampled from a texture
Growth generation, spring physics, wind simulation, the co-pilot brain, key point detection. All GPU compute kernels. 22+ kernels feeding into 30+ render pipelines. A single MTKView persists across all steps with coordinator delegates hot-swapped. GrowthPool holds pre-allocated GPU buffers that compute kernels write to and render shaders read from directly. CPU never touches geometry
Audio follows the same conviction. AVAudioEngine with real-time additive synthesis at 48kHz, zero samples. Sound is generated by the same interactions that create the visuals. Growth has texture, objects have weight, and withdrawal ends in true silence
Me, Apple Developer Academy @ Federico II
Code written fully through Claude Code. Domain knowledge, architecture, design, and taste were human
MIT