Press the house at the bottom left to see the whole lab, then click any machine in it.
Suit up opens the armour, the pilot steps out and backs in again, and the suit closes and powers up. Open and Exploded show what is under the plates. Follow the power, the flight system or the actuators, and Hover lights the six turbines.
Our own design study of what a film style armoured flying suit would take with parts that exist today, not a real product. Mass budget: 41 kg of Ti-6Al-4V armour at about 4 mm over 2.3 m², 34 kg of exoskeleton with 24 electric actuators (motor, strain wave gear, torque sensor), 26 kg of turbines, 26 kg (32 L) of kerosene, an 18 kg 3.6 kWh battery at 400 V, 11 kg of liner, cooling and life support and 6 kg of computers and sensors: 162 kg, 242 kg with an 80 kg pilot. Flight uses six kerosene micro turbines in the class of large model jet engines and the Gravity Industries jet suit: 2 × 650 N on the back, 2 × 550 N in the calves and 2 × 300 N on the forearms for control, 3.0 kN against 2.37 kN of weight. Fuel burn assumes a thrust specific consumption of 0.14 kg per N per hour, so hovering uses about 5.5 kg a minute (about 4 MW of heat at 43 MJ/kg) and the fuel lasts about 4.7 minutes. Walking at 1 to 2 kW gives about 2.5 hours on the battery. Joint torques are estimates from the suit mass and human gait data. The chest light is a power hub, not a reactor: nothing that exists stores energy that densely. Flames and plume lengths are drawn for clarity.
Drive takes you into the city behind the car; Diorama brings you back. Era moves the city and the car through time. The change starts at the car and spreads outward; each building rebuilds floor by floor behind a glowing line.
An illustration of how streets, buildings and cars have changed and might change, not a real city. Heights and cars are typical of each period: brick blocks and a Model T in 1910, concrete and a chrome coupe in 1965, glass towers and a supercar today; 2060 and 2100 are our guesses, with planted towers, smart roads, electric hypercars and, in 2100, flying cars over streets turned into parks. Speeds are cruising speeds of our own choosing.
Exploded pulls the headset apart, X-ray sees through its shell. Optics follows the light from the two panels through the lenses to your eyes; Tracking shows the infrared LEDs, the cameras that see them and the IMU. Put it on takes you inside: a home screen above the mountains, then Flight . Press Esc or Headset to take it off.
In the style of the 2016 Rift, not a copy of it: two 1080 × 1200 OLED panels at 90 Hz with low persistence, hybrid Fresnel lenses, an IPD slider, infrared LEDs under the fabric seen by external cameras, an IMU sampled at 1,000 Hz, a proximity sensor, a microphone, on-ear headphones and one cable carrying HDMI and USB. The panel images use a barrel pre-distortion with k1 = 0.22, k2 = 0.24 of our own; real values depend on the lens. The flight is an illustration: the jet's bank follows a coordinated turn, tan(φ) = v²κ/g, at about 830 km/h. Shown three times life size.
Follow the power from the mainspring through the gears, the escapement that lets them move one step at a time, or the time on the dial. Time slows the watch 5 or 25 times so you can see each tick. Wind it turns the crown. Open takes the bridges off, Dial turns it over, Exploded pulls it apart.
A generic hand-wound movement in the style of a modern 30 mm calibre, not a specific product: balance at 4 Hz (28,800 beats an hour), a 15-tooth Swiss lever escapement, a gear train with the fourth wheel turning once a minute (small seconds) and the center wheel once an hour, about 42 hours of power reserve. The balance swing settles where the escapement's push equals the losses and falls as the spring runs down; the rate error shown is illustrative. Hairspring breathing and the gear teeth are drawn, not computed for contact. Shown 35 times life size.
Zoom into the globe or press Orbit to leave the lab; zoom far out to come back. Lasers races a message across the laser mesh against the same message in undersea glass. Beams shows the satellites a dish can see and the one it is using, with a handover every 15 seconds. Launch shows Starship opening its payload slot and pushing 24 V3 satellites out one at a time, then raising them to their shell. Ride flies alongside one satellite. Dish pulls a real size dish apart; the panel above it shows its phased array steering a beam with no moving parts.
Five shells from SpaceX's FCC filings (53° at 550 km, 53.2° at 540 km, 70° at 570 km, 97.6° at 560 km and 43° at 530 km), about 7,100 satellites, close to but not exactly what is flying. Each satellite flies a circular Kepler orbit with the Earth's J2 bulge turning its plane; the Earth turns once a sidereal day under a fixed sun. Routes run on the 550 km shell's laser mesh (two links along each orbit, two to the neighbouring orbits) using the shortest path from a satellite at least 25° above the sender to one at least 25° above the receiver, at the speed of light in vacuum; real traffic also passes through ground stations, queues and switches, so real delays are higher. Glass times are typical one-way delays over today's cables (half a usual ping). Satellites are drawn about 2,000 times larger than they are and the cell grid is schematic. Starship and the V3 satellites are drawn from public images; the deployment is sped up and the orbit raise, which takes weeks, is shown in seconds; re-entries are shown more often than the one or two a day that really happen. Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble.
Follow the magma from the chamber up the conduit, the hot water from the reservoir up the wells and back down, or the power and heat to the town. Rumble builds pressure in the chamber, Erupt releases it as lava fountains, flows and an ash column. Split slides the front of the block out to show the section.
An illustration in the style of Iceland, not a real site. Basaltic magma at about 1,150 °C in a chamber some 5 km down; lava fountains of a few hundred metres and ash columns of about 10 to 15 km are typical of Icelandic eruptions. The geothermal plant is modelled loosely on Hellisheiði: wells about 2 km deep into water near 280 °C, roughly 300 MW of electricity and over 100 MW of hot water for district heating, with cooled water injected back. Geothermal gives Iceland about a quarter to a third of its electricity and heats about nine homes in ten. Heights are exaggerated; eruption timing is compressed.
Follow the pistons, rods and crank, the cam, pushrods and valves, the fuel and fire, or the oil. Engine speed and Throttle set the load. Time slows the engine 20 or 200 times so you can see each stroke. Glass turns the block and heads transparent, Exploded pulls the engine apart.
A generic 6.2 litre pushrod V8 in the style of a modern small-block, not a specific product: bore 103.25 mm, stroke 92 mm, 155 mm rods, 90° banks, a cross-plane crank with throws at 45°, 135°, 315° and 225°, two valves per cylinder and firing order 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2. Piston motion is the exact slider-crank geometry for each cylinder. The torque curve is our own shape peaking near 590 N·m, about 430 hp at 6,000 rpm. Peak piston acceleration is r·ω²·(1 + r/l): about 2,400 g at 6,000 rpm. Valve timing, combustion pressure and exhaust temperatures are illustrative. Shown 1.6 times life size; at real speed the parts move too fast to follow, which is the point.
Follow the air spiralling in over the sea, up the eyewall and out at the top, the rain, the heat drawn from the ocean, or the storm surge. Ocean sets the sea temperature: below about 26.5 °C a hurricane cannot form. Wind shear tilts and tears the storm. Landfall sends it ashore. Split cuts it in half, Satellite looks down from space.
An illustration, not a forecast model. Maximum wind rises with sea temperature above 26.5 °C along a simple line of our own (about 10 m/s per °C, capped at 85 m/s), close to the potential intensity theory's trend; shear takes away 38% and every 10 hours over land cuts it to about a third. Pressure from the Atkinson–Holliday wind–pressure relation, categories from the Saffir–Simpson scale, surge as 0.0012·v² metres on an open coast. The latent heat figure follows Emanuel's estimate of about 6 × 10¹⁴ W for a mature hurricane, around 200 times world electricity use. The storm is about 700 km across and 15 km tall, drawn at 1:350,000 across and much taller than true scale.
Follow the water through the shaft, the penstock and the tailrace, the power on the lines, or the energy stored in the upper lake. Time of day moves the sun: at midday spare solar pumps water uphill, in the evening peak it runs back down. Pump and Generate force the plant; Black start cuts the grid and restarts the town. Split slides the front of the mountain out to show the tunnels and the powerhouse, Turbine shows one pump-turbine up close.
Scaled after Bath County, Virginia: about 380 m between the lakes, about 3 GW of turbines and roughly 24 GWh stored; the model has four units instead of six and is 1:2000 horizontally with the heights exaggerated. Power is ρ·g·h·Q·η with 90% efficiency generating and 88% pumping, about 79% round trip. Solar (2.6 GW peak), wind and demand are simple daily shapes of our own; in Auto the plant pumps with any surplus over 150 MW and generates for any shortfall. Homes use 1.2 kW on average. A real black start takes minutes; here it is shortened to seconds. The water, the surge tank and the lake levels are drawn for clarity.
Follow the power from the plug to the magnetron, the waves down the waveguide into the cavity, the water molecules they flip, or the heat in the food. Food swaps a cup of water, a pizza or a bar of chocolate. Turn the turntable off to see the hot and cold spots of the standing wave; the melted spots on the chocolate are half a wavelength apart. Cutaway opens the oven, Exploded pulls it apart.
Shown four times life size. The oven runs at 2.45 GHz, a wavelength of 12.2 cm. The field in the cavity (33 × 22 × 34 cm) is the sum of its real resonant modes within 80 MHz of 2.45 GHz, weighted by how close they are, with the stirrer shifting the mix; the food heats in proportion to the field energy where it sits. We assume 70% of the magnetron's output ends up in the food and a magnetron efficiency of 65%. The transformer turns 230 V into about 2,100 V and a capacitor and diode double it to about 4,000 V for the magnetron. 250 ml of water heats by P·t / (m·c). Time is sped up for the water and the pizza and slowed for the chocolate so you can see the spots grow. Real ovens differ in size, modes and power, so the pattern will not match yours, but the spots will be about 6 cm apart.
Follow the light from the laser and the tin plasma through eleven mirrors to the wafer, the tin droplets, the stages that scan the mask and the wafer, or the wafer as its chips are printed. Source power and Dose set how fast wafers come out. High-NA swaps in the newest, larger optics. Slow-mo runs 40 times slower so you can see each droplet hit twice. Split cuts the machine in half, Exploded pulls every module apart.
A generic EUV scanner, not a specific product. Public figures: light at 13.5 nm from a tin plasma of about 220,000 K made by a CO2 laser of 20 kW or more (10.6 µm) hitting 27 µm tin droplets 50,000 times a second, first with a pre-pulse that flattens each droplet and then the main pulse; about 5.5% of the laser energy becomes 13.5 nm light. Everything runs in vacuum with hydrogen, because air absorbs EUV. Multilayer Mo/Si mirrors reflect about 68% each; after the intermediate focus there are four illuminator mirrors (two with hundreds of tiny facets), the reticle and six projection mirrors, so about 1.4% of the source power reaches the wafer. Resolution is k1·λ/NA with k1 = 0.3: 12.3 nm at NA 0.33 and 7.4 nm at 0.55, where the field is half as tall. Throughput uses our model: the dose over 96 fields of 26 × 33 mm divided by the power at the wafer, plus 15.5 s of wafer exchange, alignment and stepping (25% more for High-NA); at 250 W and 30 mJ/cm² that gives about 160 wafers an hour. Overlay about 1.1 nm, around 180 t per system (High-NA about 150 t before it is split into some 250 crates), prices of roughly $200 million and $380 million are public estimates. Droplets, the plasma and the beam are drawn much larger than real, and the internal layout is simplified.
Follow the seawater through the tubes, the hot brine from stage to stage, the steam, or the fresh water. Top brine sets how hot the brine heater runs, Seawater how much the pumps push through, and Stages how many flash chambers the plant has. Exploded lifts the roofs, tubes, trays and demisters off every stage.
A steady state model of a brine recirculation multi-stage flash plant, not a design of a real one. The brine is flashed by an equal temperature step in each stage: the vapour made is the heat released (m·cp·ΔT) over the latent heat at that stage. Pressures are the saturation pressure of water (Antoine) at the vapour temperature after boiling point elevation from the salt and 0.3 K lost across the demister. Heat recovery is limited by a 2.2 K pinch between the condensing vapour and the tubes at the hot end, so the brine heater only adds the last few kelvin: that ratio is the gain output ratio. The last stage runs 8 K above the sea and the pumps work against about 105 m at 78%. Typical plants make 50,000 to 75,000 m³ a day per unit at a gain ratio of 8 to 10 and 60 to 80 kWh of heat per m³; calcium sulphate scale limits the top brine temperature to about 112 °C with antiscalant. People served assume 250 L a day each. The model is shown at 1:250, time runs 60 times faster than real, and the flows and plume are drawn for clarity, not to scale.
The machine cuts an impeller while you watch. Follow the five axes, the spindle, the coolant or the chips. Material loads a new blank of aluminium or titanium. Program switches between roughing and finishing, with a tool change in between. Cutaway opens the machine along the spindle, Exploded pulls every assembly apart.
A generic 5-axis vertical machining centre with a 500 mm trunnion table, not a specific model: an 18,000 rpm motor spindle of 25 kW and 130 Nm with an HSK-A63 taper, ball screws with a 20 mm lead on roller guideways, 40 m/min rapids, direct drive torque motors on A and C, a 24 pocket chain magazine with a double arm changer, 40 L/min flood and 70 bar through spindle coolant. The part is a 232 mm impeller with seven blades and seven splitters, roughed with a 16 mm carbide end mill and finished with an 8 mm ball nose. The numbers use the standard formulas: n = vc / (π D), feed = fz × teeth × n, removal rate = ap × ae × feed, power = kc × removal rate, torque = power / ω, force = power / vc, tool deflection from a carbide cantilever (E 600 GPa, core 0.8 D). Cutting data are typical handbook values: vc 500 m/min and fz 0.12 mm in aluminium, 60 m/min and 0.1 mm in titanium, ap 8 mm and ae 6 mm for roughing. Specific cutting forces of about 700 N/mm² for aluminium and 1,900 N/mm² for titanium, cutting edge temperatures and tool life are our estimates; real values depend on the tool, the coating and the chip thickness. Cycle times come from the actual toolpath at these feeds. The cutting is shown 10 to 30 times faster than real; the metal removal is a height map of the part, and the finishing ball leaves small fillets at the blade roots as a real one would.
Follow the power from the busway to the chips, the water from the coolant unit to every cold plate, or the data through the copper spine. Workload switches between training and inference, or stops the pumps. View opens a rack, pulls a tray apart, or scales the pod up to a 1 GW campus.
Racks after NVIDIA's public GB200 NVL72 specifications: 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs in 18 compute trays with 9 NVLink switch trays, 13.4 TB of HBM3e, 130 TB/s NVLink, 720 PFLOPS dense FP4 (1,440 with sparsity), 132 kW nominal (HPE), eight 33 kW power shelves on a roughly 50 V DC busbar, direct to chip liquid cooling taking about 90% of the heat, one in-row coolant unit per eight racks. The coolant temperatures come from an energy balance at our 110 L/min per rack; the chip thermal resistance, coolant volume, idle power and the size of the training power swings are our estimates. The campus uses a PUE of 1.2 and an average American home at 1.2 kW. No vendor branding; layouts vary by builder.
Control rods sets how far the rods are pulled out: power climbs, then levels off as the fuel heats. Scram drops every rod. Pulse fires the transient rod out of a cold core for a burst of more than a gigawatt. Follow the neutrons of the chain reaction or the heat, open the shaft, or take a fuel element apart.
A TRIGA Mark I style pool reactor, the design General Atomics built for universities, at full size: a 2 m pool 6.5 m deep, about ninety uranium zirconium hydride elements with stainless cladding in hexagonal rings, a graphite reflector, three control rods and a pneumatic transient rod. The physics is point kinetics with two delayed neutron groups (β 0.007, prompt neutron generation time 40 µs) and the fuel's prompt negative temperature coefficient (5×10⁻⁵ per °C), with an excess reactivity of $3 and $2 in the transient rod. These are our estimates tuned so that 1 MW steady and a $2 pulse of about 1,200 MW and 28 MJ match what TRIGA reactors publish; details differ from reactor to reactor. The glow's brightness is drawn on a log scale.
Wind turns on the fan wall, Gusts makes it unsteady, and the payload adds 2.5 kg. Follow the air through the props, the control signals from the flight controller, what the sensors see, or the power from the batteries.
A generic industrial quadcopter at full size: 6.5 kg, 0.9 m between opposite motors, 21 inch props, two 263 Wh packs. The flight is simulated live: a rigid body held by a cascaded position and attitude controller, mixed into four motor thrusts. Power uses momentum theory with a figure of merit of 0.7 and 85% drive efficiency; rotor speed uses a thrust coefficient of 0.1. Drag area 0.12 m². Props are drawn slower than they really turn so you can see them.
Follow the air over, around and under the car, see the pressure on every surface, or trace the power from fuel and battery to the wheels. Speed sets the wind tunnel. Straight lays the wing flaps flat, Brake glows the discs and charges the battery.
A 2026 regulation car at full size from the public FIA rules: 3.4 m wheelbase, 1.9 m wide, 768 kg minimum, 18 inch wheels, active aero, about 400 kW from the V6 and 350 kW from the electric motor. Downforce and drag use ½ρv² with lift and drag areas we estimated for this kind of car (about 3.3 and 1.05 m² in corner mode, 1.3 and 0.62 m² in straight mode) and a tyre grip of 1.6; teams do not publish theirs. The pressure map is an illustration of where pressure is high and low, not a CFD result. No team livery.
The view through the portal is traced one ray per pixel through curved spacetime. Mass changes the numbers, not the picture: a black hole looks the same at any size, only the scale changes. Drop a probe to watch time slow at the horizon, or dive in .
Black hole: exact light paths in the Schwarzschild metric (no spin), a thin disk from the innermost stable orbit at three horizon radii, with relativistic Doppler beaming and gravitational redshift. Wormhole: the Ellis metric, a real solution of Einstein's equations that would need negative energy to stay open. Inside the horizon every path ends at the singularity; the jump to another universe in the dive comes from the idealised maths of an eternal black hole (the Einstein Rosen bridge), which closes too fast for anything to cross. Nobody knows what really happens there.
Payload puts a box in its hands. Follow colours every actuator by how hard it is working, traces the power from the battery in the chest, or looks at the hands, whose fingers are pulled by tendons from motors in the forearm.
A general humanoid at human scale, after the public figures for Tesla's Optimus: 1.73 m, a 2.3 kWh battery, about 100 W standing and 500 W walking, and 28 body actuators of six kinds shown at AI Day 2022: rotary joints of 20, 110 and 180 Nm (frameless motor, strain wave gear, crossed roller bearing, encoder, torque sensor) and linear screws of 500, 3,900 and 8,000 N (motor and planetary roller screw with a force sensor). Where each one sits is our best reading of public images; torques, forces and runtime are estimates from simple statics.
X-ray sweeps a scanner over the truck and shows what the steel hides. Follow the energy from the battery to the motors, the motors themselves, or the cast structure. Set a speed , or try a launch and regenerative braking. The truck stays on the dyno; its wheels drive the rollers.
Drawn from public photos at full size (5.68 m long, 3.81 m wheelbase). Mass 3,104 kg, 630 kW from three motors, a 123 kWh pack of 1,344 cells. Power follows air drag (drag area about 1.04 m²), rolling resistance of 1.1% and an 88% efficient drivetrain. Range is at a steady speed from a full pack. Tesla does not publish every detail; the inside layout is simplified.
Cutaway opens the motor across the middle. Current lights each of the 54 slots in the colour of its phase, Field shows the north and south poles the currents make, and Gears opens the two stage gearbox. Regen turns the motor into a generator.
A permanent magnet motor with 54 slots and six poles, geared about 12 to 1 (17/55 then 19/72). Motion is shown about 600 times slower than real so you can follow it. Layout simplified from public teardowns.
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