I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around

23 points by bilsbie 2 hours ago on hackernews | 19 comments

AmazingEveryDay | 2 hours ago

> The sunlight here comes from its mirrors, and its "gravity" comes from its spin.

Where do the clouds come from? The AI?

ben_w | an hour ago

I can't use the site on my phone, can barely even read any of the text, so I don't know the text you're quoting.

If you are asking if clouds in such a structure are realistic, I'd expect so: clouds do form naturally in even much smaller spaces, e.g. one of the NASA buildings, I forget if it was the Saturn V or Space Shuttle assembly building or both.

nickff | an hour ago

The Vertical Assembly Building was used for both the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle, though it had much more ‘headroom’ for the latter. From what I’ve read the rumors of clouds forming inside of it are actually a myth, though there are condensation and airflow issues. I don’t have citations handy as it’s been a while (decade) since I’ve read this.
They were in the original 1970's renderings too:

https://nss.org/o-neill-cylinder-space-settlement/

Given Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmosphere, a sufficiently large structure will also have Earth-like clouds.

Jtarii | an hour ago

Takes forever to load, runs terribly and looks awful.

iagooar | 33 minutes ago

Not my experience at all.
Motivated by this comment I decided to give it another shot, the tab crashed immediately upon clicking the "fly" button.

notfried | an hour ago

I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds.

I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation.

Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.

Avamander | 47 minutes ago

I suspect it needs a few tokens spent on optimization and clean-up.

petronic | 52 minutes ago

Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot.

I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.

RobotToaster | 47 minutes ago

Anyone else getting this error on android chrome?

>HipparcosGraphics error on arm valhall: device lost: A valid external Instance reference no longer exists. (tap to close; a screenshot to @gruberbuilds helps fix it)

RobotToaster | 35 minutes ago

update: I just tried it on firefox on windows and it works fine there.
Neat. I enjoyed the NPCs chatting about life onboard.

Angostura | 42 minutes ago

On iOS Safari:

Island Three could not start

Range consisting of offset and length are out of bounds

Reloading the page may help. A screenshot of this to @gruberbuilds on X helps fix it.

I’m not on X

aarontian0 | 41 minutes ago

This is crazy Claude built this.

OutOfHere | 33 minutes ago

Over half the people can't run it right or at all. Why not share some representative walkthrough videos?
The weirdest experience in this must be to never know if you're walking uphill or downhill.
I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.

Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...

ForHackernews | 25 minutes ago

This is a website, not an O'Neill cylinder, and I can't walk around it.