Navigate Branching Futures with Your Hands
Psychohistory is a live, open-source spatial simulator for branching futures. It begins from Google Search-grounded current events — or any scenario you type — then lets a webcam-tracked hand seek, commit to, collapse, and navigate branches through a Three.js causal lightcone. Gemini generates plausible next moves under constraints built around leverage, political survival, and the least-cost action each actor can tolerate. It is a game about touching history, not a claim to forecast it. The interface treats the simulation like a forbidden instrument rather than a dashboard: gold on obsidian, wireframe icosahedrons, curved causal splines, and a persistent view of the present. Built with Vite, Three.js, GSAP, MediaPipe, Gemini, and Google Search grounding.
I first read Asimov's Foundation books on hour-long school-bus rides across Alaska, before I had a phone to fill the time. The image of the Prime Radiant — history made visible as something you could stand inside — stayed with me for twenty years. This project was a two-week attempt to build that feeling, not the fictional mathematics behind it.
The simulator has two starting points. Observe the Present grounds a baseline in live current events; Simulate a Scenario begins from a seed you write yourself. A divergence control then changes how far the branches may move from the probable toward the surprising, making uncertainty something you can see and perform.
The hardest problem was designing belief, not prophecy. Unconstrained generations rushed toward apocalypse; prompts asking for balance produced instant cooperation and frictionless institutions. I rebuilt the generation process around actors with leverage, what kept them in power, which moves would be politically suicidal, and the lowest-cost action each could tolerate. Early futures stay deliberately boring; novelty has to earn a believable path.
A flat decision tree made time feel like a diagram. Psychohistory projects futures into the Z-axis as a causal lightcone instead. Distant branches shrink and desaturate, committing moves the camera along a spline, siblings dissolve into an abandoned past, and the minimap translates the same coordinates into an overhead causal topology.
The gesture vocabulary was governed by an ordinary laptop webcam. Open palm seeks, pinch-and-hold commits, fist collapses, and a peace sign tunes divergence; their silhouettes are deliberately difficult to confuse. The pointer follows the base of the middle finger rather than the fingertip because the knuckle stays stable while the fingers pinch.
Generation latency stays inside the fiction. Shell nodes, splines, and placeholder cards appear immediately while the camera moves; cards marked Probability Wave Collapsing become named futures as Gemini returns. The wait reads as the world resolving rather than an interface stalled behind JSON.
I avoided blue holograms, scanlines, and terminal cosplay. Civilization supplied historical ceremony, Marvel's Eternals supplied materializing gold, and an orrery supplied mechanical precision. I showed the result at conferences and during an Anthropic talk, then stopped deliberately: more features would dilute this focused experiment, while a genuinely rigorous geopolitical product would need to become a different project.
The UHD scenario sequence below comes from a deterministic presentation fork of the production interface so each product state could be documented consistently. The original webcam captures and demonstration video remain the record of live gesture tracking and model behavior.