I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around

(island-three.gruberbuilds.workers.dev)

23 points | by bilsbie 2 hours ago ago

20 comments

  • petronic 42 minutes ago

    Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot.

    I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.

  • Jtarii an hour ago

    Takes forever to load, runs terribly and looks awful.

    • iagooar 22 minutes ago

      Not my experience at all.

      • Jtarii 13 minutes ago

        Motivated by this comment I decided to give it another shot, the tab crashed immediately upon clicking the "fly" button.

  • Angostura 32 minutes ago

    On iOS Safari:

    Island Three could not start

    Range consisting of offset and length are out of bounds

    Reloading the page may help. A screenshot of this to @gruberbuilds on X helps fix it.

    I’m not on X

  • xg15 15 minutes ago

    The weirdest experience in this must be to never know if you're walking uphill or downhill.

    • Sharlin a few seconds ago

      The further uphill you walk the easier it becomes as the apparent gravity decreases.

  • RobotToaster 36 minutes ago

    Anyone else getting this error on android chrome?

    >HipparcosGraphics error on arm valhall: device lost: A valid external Instance reference no longer exists. (tap to close; a screenshot to @gruberbuilds helps fix it)

    • RobotToaster 25 minutes ago

      update: I just tried it on firefox on windows and it works fine there.

  • AmazingEveryDay 2 hours ago

    > The sunlight here comes from its mirrors, and its "gravity" comes from its spin.

    Where do the clouds come from? The AI?

    • T-A an hour ago

      They were in the original 1970's renderings too:

      https://nss.org/o-neill-cylinder-space-settlement/

      Given Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmosphere, a sufficiently large structure will also have Earth-like clouds.

    • ben_w an hour ago

      I can't use the site on my phone, can barely even read any of the text, so I don't know the text you're quoting.

      If you are asking if clouds in such a structure are realistic, I'd expect so: clouds do form naturally in even much smaller spaces, e.g. one of the NASA buildings, I forget if it was the Saturn V or Space Shuttle assembly building or both.

      • nickff an hour ago

        The Vertical Assembly Building was used for both the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle, though it had much more ‘headroom’ for the latter. From what I’ve read the rumors of clouds forming inside of it are actually a myth, though there are condensation and airflow issues. I don’t have citations handy as it’s been a while (decade) since I’ve read this.

  • aarontian0 30 minutes ago

    This is crazy Claude built this.

  • notfried an hour ago

    I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds.

    I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation.

    Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.

    • Avamander 37 minutes ago

      I suspect it needs a few tokens spent on optimization and clean-up.

  • hoelle 36 minutes ago

    Neat. I enjoyed the NPCs chatting about life onboard.

  • OutOfHere 22 minutes ago

    Over half the people can't run it right or at all. Why not share some representative walkthrough videos?

  • maxlin 15 minutes ago

    I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.

    Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...

  • ForHackernews 14 minutes ago

    This is a website, not an O'Neill cylinder, and I can't walk around it.