Every visualization brief hides the same small questions. Where does the sun actually stand over this plot in late October at four in the afternoon? What does a 24 mm lens do to the proportions of a lobby that a 50 mm keeps honest? Is this room warm because of the material palette, or because someone set the lights to 2,700 K? I answer these every week with a 3D model open and a deadline running. The tools that answer them are not complicated. They are just usually locked inside expensive software.
So I started taking them out. Vision Graphics Labs is a collection of free browser apps about light, colour, geometry and sound. The count keeps changing, so I stopped writing it down. They are made of the same skills I use to visualize buildings, small enough to give away.
Light and shadow. Sunner plots sun paths and shadows for any place on Earth; drag time around a wheel and watch shadows sweep a model. Warmmer re-lights one room from candlelight to overcast sky as you spin a Kelvin wheel. Lensser puts focal length, aperture, distance and sensor size on wheels and shows perspective and depth of field react live in 3D. Shaddower turns the sun-path problem into a game: deduce hour, season and true north from shadows alone.
Colour. Paletter builds OKLCH palettes from twelve harmony methods. Mixxer asks you to mix one colour twice, with light and with paint, and shows why the answers differ. Differ makes you spot identical colours your eyes swear are different.
Geometry and structure. Extrudder lets you trace a floor plan, pull it up into 3D and take the model home. Vaultter covers 4,000 years from arch to vault: spin the timeline, drop the keystone, raise the vault in 3D. Trusser is a bridge-building game, survive the load with the least steel. Cogger sets gear-train puzzles; Bounccer sets mirror, lens and prism puzzles with honest Snell’s law.
Spatial thinking as a daily game. Viewwer is the classic spatial-aptitude drill: spin a 3D shape, spot its true flat view. Sliccer asks for the cross-section before the blade lands. Foldder asks which net folds into which solid. Rotatter asks same-or-mirrored against the clock. Carvver is boolean-operation golf. Frammer runs ten-second composition drills: crop, place the horizon, hit the thirds.
Sound and motion. Musiccer is a chord wheel with MIDI export; Beatter spins Euclidean rhythm circles with real drum synthesis. Spiraller draws gear-driven rosettes you can export for a laser cutter; Penduller is a Victorian drawing machine of damped Lissajous figures; Epiccer redraws any shape you sketch with spinning circles, Fourier series made visible. Planetter puts the real solar system on two wheels and lets you dial the scale to honest.
More are always on the way. Gearwalkker, Swingger and Ptolemmer are next: gear ratios, pendulums, epicycles.
They demonstrate the competence instead of describing it. Anyone can write “we understand light” on a services page. Sunner shows a shadow sweeping a model as you drag the hour. A client who has played with these for five minutes already knows what to ask me for.
They are the same problems at a smaller scale. A sun study for a planning submission, a lens choice for a marketing still, a palette for a brand rollout, a floor plan that needs to become a massing model by tomorrow: the daily questions of architectural visualization, with the project removed.
They cost you nothing, in every sense. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded. No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Open one on a phone in a site meeting and it works.
Toys. Sunner will not replace a proper solar study for a permit, and Extrudder will not replace the model I build from your CAD set. What they show is the kind of tool I build when a project needs one, the same competence that at full scale becomes a client-facing web viewer, a variant configurator or a launch microsite, all fixed lines on the price list. And if none of that is relevant to you, enjoy the toys.
Every app here, and anything built the same way, can carry a brand. Your colours, your logo, your domain, your subject: a sun-path tool on a developer’s site that already knows the plot, a colour-mixing game for a paint brand, a lens wheel for a camera shop, a cross-section drill for an architecture school.
- I build it for you. Brief, prototype, launch. A campaign toy or daily game is a fixed line on the price list.
- I teach you to build it. A workshop day for your team on how these are made, from the physics to the deploy.
- I just give you the idea. A short session on what knowledge your brand actually owns and what kind of game or tool would let people play with it. Most brands have one; few have noticed.
If one of them makes you want the full-scale version, get in touch.