What's Fragment?

Play with the Fragment sketch above 🎨

Hey Folks,
first, welcome to Fragment!

If you have clicked on the link above, you may already know what Fragment is about. If you haven't (yet), then let's describe it this way:

Fragment is a minimalistic yet superpowered 2D shader-based generative art playground.

In other words, it's a web app where you write only the shader code and share your creation with your buddies. Fragment makes available many constants from the main web app (pointer position, webcam texture, mic volume, etc.) and handles all the complex WebGL setup for you so that you can focus on writing only GLSL code.

Minimalistic collaborative approach

Fragment is sessionless. There is no concept of "user" or "register/login".
You just come, write your shader, description, Twitter handle and share the URL.

The whole shader code is part of the URL, but Fragment has its own URL-shortener, so no worries!

Then, whoever wants to fork it just modifies the shader code, updates the description + Twitter handle and shares the URL. That's it.

What Fragment is not and cannot do

Not now, not ever

• upload custom textures and use them in shaders
• have sliders to push numerical uniforms into the shaders

Maybe one day

• have user registration/session
• have video capture capabilities
• keep local history
• have a "featured" page

It's also a journey

Fragment is a side project that I'm building in my spare time and making available for free because the hosting on Digitalocean costs only a few dollars a month.
The original intention was to make it only for me so that I can easily play with shader code and experiment with fun renderings. When I reached a point where my little local app was starting to look like something that could also be cool for others, I thought "yeah, sure, let's host it somewhere!".

I'm really into graphic code but not super into the full-stack/auth game and this is one of the reasons there is no "register/login" in Fragment. It was just simpler to build without it (at least for me) and as mentioned above, this may change in the future if I get more full-stacky someday.

There are many features on the roadmap that are yet to be added so make sure to visit regularly. I will probably make a small blog post when they happen!

Please, try it: fragment.ink and play with the many examples built in!
You can also read the help page, where every built-in uniform is explained!

Until next time, Cheers,

— @jonathanlurie