# impliedreality.com: a visualization
The scene opens on a dark background (nearly black) with a camera slowly orbiting in space. Thin white semi-transparent rods - like luminous needles or matchsticks - begin appearing one by one in the empty void. They seem to float randomly at first, but as more accumulate, a pattern becomes clear: they're all positioned as if lying along the surface of an invisible sphere, each rod lying *tangent* to (parallel with the surface of) this sphere rather than pointing toward its center.
The process starts slowly, with rods appearing leisurely, giving you time to wonder what's happening. Then the pace accelerates dramatically - rods appear faster and faster until they're materializing in rapid succession, the invisible sphere filling out like a sketch being frantically completed. As the sphere becomes more densely populated with hundreds of rods, its spherical form becomes unmistakable despite never being explicitly drawn. The addition slows again, settling into a moment of calm where the fully-implied sphere rotates peacefully, complete in its suggestion.
Then the process reverses. Rods begin disappearing - slowly at first, then accelerating to a frantic removal, before finally slowing again as the last few rods vanish into the void. You're left with darkness and slowly orbiting emptiness, no hint remaining of the sphere that was just so clearly present. After a pause in this sparse state, the cycle begins again.
Throughout, the camera's orbit speed matches the intensity of the activity - moving faster during the frantic middle periods, slower during the calm beginnings and endings. A small graph in the lower-right corner shows a sharp peaked curve that controls this pacing - essentially a visual heartbeat of the animation.
When viewed in a web browser, the first line of the artist's statement is partially visible at the bottom of the viewport - moderately large print, in semi-translucent white. If the user scrolls down, the text appears to slide up while the visualization remains in place, until the paragraph of the artist's statement is resting, centered, over the top of the visualization. The semi-transparent white text blends with the semi-transparent white rods; the text is more legible when the visualization is more empty.
The artist's statement:
> This is how I visualize the nebulous, constantly shifting mirage of "reality" - as the persistent (if not fully stable) shape implied by the intersection of all our perspectives, all our beliefs. What I see and know and believe may not ever intersect directly with what you see and know and believe, but lay all those lines down on a multi-dimensional canvas and a shape begins to emerge. Can I reach you? Can you reach me?
>
> [Isaac Bowen](https://isaacbowen.com/)