Umbra · experimental WebGL studio · est. 2019

The darkis a medium.

We write raymarched light for planetariums, arena tours, and the open web. Everything you are looking at right now, the terrain, the fog, the failing sun, is a single fragment shader, computed live on your GPU.

52.50°N · 13.41°E WebGL2 · GLSL · 60fps No cameras were used
Scroll, the sun will set

Manifesto01

Light, instructed.

Most studios photograph the world. We describe it, as signed distance, as noise octaves, as a march through fog, and let the machine develop the film sixty times a second.

  1. 01

    The GPU is a place

    Every project is a location shoot inside the silicon. We scout it in formulas, dress it in noise, and light it with a single equation for the sun.

  2. 02

    No stock. No seams.

    Nothing here was filmed, rendered offline, or bought from a library. If a pixel exists, a function put it there, and can put it somewhere better.

  3. 03

    Restraint is the spectacle

    A dreamscape earns its scale through what it withholds. We spend our budget on fog, silence, and one ember of colour.

  4. 04

    Sixty frames is a promise

    Beauty that stutters is not beauty. We profile on five-year-old laptops and ship shaders that respect the battery they run on.

Selected works02

Five commissions,
zero video files.

Everything below shipped as running code. The stills our clients approve are frames a GPU can find again, any night, at any resolution.

W·01

Heliostat

Zeiss-Großplanetarium, Berlin · permanent installation, 2025

A raymarched sun that dies and is reborn on a 12-metre dome, once per visitor cycle. Volumetric scattering tuned until the astronomers stopped correcting us and started watching.

  • WebGL2
  • Dome projection
  • 8K × 8K
W·02

Tide Engine

Maritimt Museum, Bergen · interactive wall, 2024

An FFT ocean with a century of real storm data folded into its spectrum. Visitors turn a brass wheel; the North Sea answers. No two waves have ever repeated.

  • Compute FFT
  • Historical data
  • Touchless input
W·03

Signal / Noise

Ólafur Arnalds · European tour visuals, 2024

Signed distance fields that breathe with the stage mix, forty milliseconds behind the felt piano. Twenty-two nights, one shader, no pre-renders on the bus.

  • Audio-reactive SDF
  • Live uniforms
  • 22 venues
W·04

Orrery

Independent watchmaker · product film, 2023

A tourbillon rebuilt as pure mathematics: every wheel a distance function, every jewel a refraction. The film ships as 240 kilobytes of code and looks like a macro lens.

  • Raymarched CSG
  • Path-traced stills
  • 240 KB
W·05

Low Residency

Self-initiated · browser dreamscape, 2023

The study that became this site: a terrain that never resolves, fog that never lifts, a sun on a scroll wheel. Two hundred thousand visitors; average stay, four quiet minutes.

  • Fragment shader
  • Scroll-driven time
  • Open source

Method03

How a dreamscape
gets made.

Scout
We sketch the terrain as one distance function and walk it in greyscale for a week. If it isn’t a place yet, no palette will save it.
Weather
Fractal noise becomes fog, wind, and the grain of the hillsides. Weather is where a render stops being geometry and starts being memory.
Light
One sun, one equation of scatter. We move it by the hour, the way this page moves it by the scroll, until the silhouette says enough.
Discipline
Then we delete. Steps, octaves, colours. What survives runs on a phone at sixty and still feels like standing somewhere.

Contact04

Bring us your
impossible brief.

We take three commissions a year. Installations, tours, product films, the strange ones nobody else will quote. If it needs a camera, we are the wrong studio. If it needs a coordinate system, write to us.

penumbra@umbra.systems
StudioRitterstraße 12, Berlin · by appointment, after dark
CurrentlyBooking Q1 2027 · one dome, one tour, one unknown
Right nowAfter dark in Berlin