Waving at your webcam, professionally

Hey 👋 — today's mix leans into sound as a physical thing you can shape with your hands, plus a couple of browser tricks that don't need a single line of JavaScript. And if quantum computing hardware has ever confused you, there's a solid explainer waiting at the end.

Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

Air Theremin

This one's a delight: point your webcam at your hands (or tilt your phone, or just move your mouse if you're feeling shy) and the pitch and volume respond in real time, with waveform, reverb, and echo controls to shape the tone. It's the kind of project that reminds you the browser is basically a free physics-and-sound lab now, no plugins required.

"Play it in mid-air, two ways." — Air Theremin

(via HN discussion)

After Tone – Sound as spatial geometry

After Tone

In a similar spirit of treating sound as something you can shape rather than just hear, artist Yingjie Bei built a Möbius loop out of 56 speakers, sending a single tone chasing itself sequentially around the twisted structure. The effect turns pitch and timing into a literal path through space (via CreativeApplications).

HTML can do that

A running, growing catalog of UI behaviors — popovers, dialogs, and more — that plain HTML now handles on its own, no JavaScript required, complete with live demos to poke at (via Lobsters discussion).

CSS navigation matching, early days

While we're on browsers doing more with less script — CSS-Tricks digs into an early-stage spec proposal, @location and @navigation, that would let you declare page-to-page routing and trigger view transitions straight in CSS. It's speculative and years from landing anywhere, but it's a peek at how much of the routing layer might eventually move out of JavaScript entirely.

Building a quantum computer, one fragile qubit at a time

Building a quantum computer, one fragile qubit at a time

A clear-eyed tour through the competing hardware bets — superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and the rest — that different labs are racing to turn into the qubit standard, with a good sense of just how finicky each approach still is (via Quanta Magazine).

Quick hits

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