We wanted the app to work on an iPhone and that required the use of Apple Metal code. This could of course be ported to a desktop but we're not sure there would be much interest in that?

Maybe WebGPU would be a good porting target.

Really cool app btw!

I have once seen a video of Kip Thorne, explaining that the black hole visual effects of Interstellar were an actual physical simulation. I wouldn't have thought, that it was feasible to run on an iPhone.

The black hole simulation that was shown in the movie Interstellar is explained in detail in this paper, freely available on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

As a physicist with a modest background in computing, I was also surprised by how powerful the iPhone GPU is. It can indeed lens the input from the camera at high resolution and in real time with high FPS.

Cool, thanks for the reference!

I was able to install it on my M1 Mac, fwiw.

Excellent! Hope it looked cool.