Built from geometry
Architecture and scenery start in Blender and arrive as compressed models. Switch to the geometry view to see the structure underneath.
THE ETHER / TEXT EDITION
Field notes
A personal website, built as a place. Notes on the project, the person behind it, and what you can find here.
Hello. I’m Kylan.
I’m Kylan Dixon. I build software and places to explore.
I wanted a website you could walk through. The Ether is that experiment: a forest, a waterfront, a small city, and a few things to figure out along the way.
This site is the first project on display. The world, interface, sound, and interactions are all part of it. I’ll add more work here as it’s ready to share.
A website with a place in it.
The Ether is a playable personal website: three connected spaces, an original humanoid resident you can customize, and an optional puzzle that reveals a fourth destination.
Light after dark
Moonlight, wet stone, and windows in the distance. The lighting and materials give each part of Nocturne its own atmosphere.
An optional soundtrack
Synthesized ambience and small responses to the things you interact with. Audio starts only when you turn it on.
Made for a browser
Shared geometry, compressed assets, and adaptive resolution keep the scene manageable. Rendering pauses when the tab is hidden. A text edition is always available.
Four places. Four notes.
The notes you can find in the world, collected here. You can read them without entering the 3D scene.
01A place between places+
The machine has no visible support. Its reflection stretches across worn concrete. Someone has written on a service panel: “A good question is a kind of engine.”
02The resident inventor+
An assembly bench. A cup gone cold. Several ideas in various states of becoming. A note on the desk: “Leave room for the thing you didn’t plan.”
03Something is listening+
Three instruments point at empty sky. Each bears an engraved frequency. Perhaps empty is only another word for untuned.
04The last transmission+
You were never meant to finish the world. Only to find the part you wanted to add to it. Thank you for spending a little of your time here. — Kylan
✧The signal puzzle, explained+
Match the three receivers to their engraved frequencies: 144 Hz, 192 Hz, and 128 Hz. The aligned signal reveals the Unwritten. The “Reveal the passage” control offers the same destination without solving the puzzle.
Things that respond.
Wake the engine, ring the tide bell, start the orrery, open the glass garden, or use the telescope. These are the objects and interactions in the current world.
✧The city that remembers+
A weathered terminal stands beneath the waterfront pavilion’s warm lanterns. One switch wakes the neighborhood: its windows and signs gradually brighten together. Most of the city is still beyond reach. This little room is its first open door.
✧The moon keeps the tide+
At the end of the stone landing, the forest gives way to a dark inlet. Ripples divide the moon into a thousand pieces; every one finds its way back. Across the trees, a few city windows are still awake. FIELD NOTE / The moon surface uses NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery.
✧The grove that listens+
The seed lantern answers with a pulse. The small lanterns brighten under the canopy, and spores trace a quiet current between the natural leaves. The trees seem to share a single quiet thought. FIELD NOTE / These organisms respond to presence rather than daylight.
✧The sleeping engine+
The gyroscope has been counting the moments between visitors. Give it a little power and its orbits begin to remember their purpose. A machine can be patient without being asleep.
✧An arrival without a date+
ARRIVAL MANIFEST — One survey probe. No recorded origin. Cargo: a few unfinished ideas. Instructions, in a different hand: “You do not need a destination to begin. But do come back and tell us what you saw.”
✧The tide bell+
The bell sends a circle of light across the water. Somewhere below the surface, another bell answers. It is always one note higher. No one has found the cable connecting them.
✧The third maintenance ledger+
SHIFT 03 / The arrival hall is holding pressure. The western service passage still leads to the Workshop; the eastern one to the Observatory. Someone has added a note beneath the inspection checklist: “A place becomes real when you can take the long way through it.”
✧A little room to breathe+
The handwheel turns and a thin ribbon of condensation escapes the return pipe. A quiet change in the room’s voice. Not every machine is here to open a secret; some are simply keeping the place alive.
✧Beyond the viewing slit+
Beyond the concrete wall, wet rock runs down to the water. A weathered path follows the shoreline. The hall is only the first room of this place. The rest will be built slowly, with enough space left between things to find your own way.
✧A clock for impossible planets+
These little planets orbit a sun that has never existed. Each moves at its own pace; none is late. The note tucked under the base says: “An accurate model of an imaginary thing is still a kind of truth.”
✧Specimen 001: a little possibility+
Inside the specimen chamber, a small branching organism answers your probe with light. Its label reads POSSIBILITY. Beneath that, in much smaller handwriting: “Keep out of direct certainty.”
✧The unfinished drawer+
A folded map, three unusually beautiful screws, and a prototype that does not quite work. On the back of the map: “Do not throw away the version that taught you something.” The rest of the drawer is deliberately empty.
✧A little farther than the eye+
The aperture turns toward a darker patch of sky. What looked like empty space resolves into a constellation: a small survey creature, leaving a trail of questions. The telescope was built to notice what the eye dismisses.
✧A map drawn from listening+
The atlas charts distances in intervals between notes. Its three reference stars are marked 144, 192, and 128. A margin note reads: “If you cannot see the passage, try listening to the shape of it.”
✧The stone that forgot to fall+
A dark stone floats above a brass cradle. Its surface is etched with a pattern resembling the machine at the Threshold. The catalog lists its age as BEFORE, and its weight as SOMETIMES.
✧A light left for the next visitor+
A lantern, a blank page, and a place to sit. The final note is short: “An unfinished world is an invitation. Thank you for bringing your curiosity into mine.” A small light will remember that you were here.
A place you can walk into.
On your first expedition, shape a forest-city resident in the studio, or skip the builder and enter with the default. Choose a starting face, sculpt eight facial features, select skin, hair and eyes, and fit a helmet and backpack independently. Portrait view temporarily hides your helmet for editing. Your field shirt and trousers use photographed cotton and denim surfaces, stitched edges and baked fold shading. The complete MakeHuman Ponytail01 hairstyle keeps its original texture layout and coverage, with fitted forehead roots and gently moving tips. Smile, brow and eyelid expressions come from the resident’s authored source shapes; the studio offers neutral, soft-smile and attentive previews without changing your saved face. Idle weight shifts and subtle breathing remain optional through reduced motion. Your appearance carries into the world and remains editable at the Workshop or in Settings. The launch display follows real world assembly; reduced motion and the readable edition remain available. Returning visits keep your resident, load the world in the background, and show an optional orbital reentry animation. Downloaded models can be reused. Clear downloaded art separately from your journal in Settings.
A moonlit broadleaf forest surrounds a small cyber-city on continuous coastal ground. Natural branching trees, wet shale, fallen timber, and a dark inlet establish the first Nocturne study. A lowered, open-roof field station sits at the center, with real doorways to the Workshop and Observatory. Follow the curved lantern path into an open waterfront pavilion to wake the district lights, or take the long stone pier across the inlet to the moon basin. The distant skyline is scenery in this first study. See the visual direction and production research ↗
Bark, slate, and weathered metal use original generated color tiles guided by the concept art, with independent photographic normal and roughness detail. These are artist-made materials, not matched scanned PBR sets. Residents now use CC0 Vitruvian anatomy with its matching skin color, normal, and roughness maps. Eight locally authored identity morphs shape the jaw, chin, cheeks, nose, eyes, brow and lips. The body, clothes, head and equipment follow a shared 52-joint skeleton. The helmet adapts Khronos FlightHelmet; the daypack is from Innerscene, both CC0. Idle, walking and weight-shift motions are retargeted Mixamo clips, used under Adobe’s game-use permissions rather than the CC0 asset license. Phones load reduced geometry and mostly 512-pixel textures, with 1024-pixel face and hair color maps to preserve portrait detail. Cotton Jersey and Denim Fabric 05 are CC0 materials from Poly Haven. Character and motion provenance ↗ · Generated world-material briefs ↗ Other surfaces use photographic color, normal, and roughness maps from Poly Haven, released under CC0. Materials: Concrete Floor Worn 001, Concrete Wall 007, Aerial Rocks 04, Rusty Metal 04, Bark Brown 01, and Forest Ground 01. The night environment is Qwantani Night (Pure Sky). Surface credits ↗ · Night-sky credits ↗ · NASA moon credits ↗
[ Redacted. ]
This channel is closed for now. Contact details are intentionally withheld.
How the scene is built.
Detailed near meshes, simpler distant vegetation, shared photographic surface maps, and restrained leaf translucency create a richer place to explore. Higher-detail maps stream after arrival: generated color tiles progress from 512 to 1024 pixels; photographed rock and soil color and photographic normal/roughness maps use GPU-compressed KTX2 where supported. Low-power mode retains lighter materials. The light itself comes from an original arrangement of lamps and a photographed night-sky environment.
Ways to explore.
This edition works without JavaScript or 3D graphics. Explore at eye level with WASD or arrow keys, drag to look, hold Shift to move faster, and press E near an object to interact. Space jumps, and F optionally captures the mouse for continuous looking; Escape releases it. V switches to a camera following your resident. Controls & sensitivity includes a DPI scale slider; new and existing expeditions start gently at 0.40× unless you save another value. The touch pad supports movement on phones; drag elsewhere in the world to look, and use the Jump button. Destination buttons guide you along walking routes through the world. Escape cancels a route. Sound is optional. Reduced-motion settings are respected.
Discoveries and resident choices stay in this browser’s local storage. No account is required. If storage is unavailable, your current expedition still works, but it will not be remembered after you leave.