Navigate Branching Futures with Your Hands
What if you could move through possible future realities using only your hands? Inspired by a lifelong fascination with Asimov's psychohistory, this simulator reads live geopolitical data — or any scenario you type in — and branches into possible futures you navigate with hand gestures via webcam. Pinch to commit to a timeline, open your palm to explore, close your fist to collapse a branch. Powered by Gemini with Google Search grounding, tuned with realpolitik and Machiavellian reasoning to keep the branches of history feeling real. Gold-on-obsidian aesthetic, wireframe icosahedron nodes, curved splines through 3D space. Vanilla stack: Vite, Three.js, GSAP, MediaPipe.
The project started with the feeling of Asimov's Foundation books, not the math. I wanted the sensation of standing in front of branching futures and choosing where to look next.
The simulator has two starting points. It can observe the present, grounding itself in live current events, or it can start from a scenario seed you type yourself. From there, it generates a baseline and branches into possible futures, then branches again.
The webcam gesture layer turns the simulation into a spatial interface. An open palm seeks across branches, pinch-and-hold commits to a timeline, and a fist collapses futures you want to discard. A divergence dial controls how strange the futures get, from grounded analysis to more lateral speculation.