Burisu — KPT Bryce, reborn in the browser on WebGPU

We started Burisu (ブライス) — a from-scratch remake of KPT Bryce, the 1990s fractal-landscape program that a generation of digital artists used to render alien terrain and impossible skies. Burisu brings that experience back as a fully client-side web app: a Rust engine compiled to WASM, rendering through WebGPU in the browser.

The shape of it

• Rust + wgpu for the scene model, procedural terrain, and a progressive ray-traced renderer.
• A TypeScript/Svelte UI shell that recreates the spirit of the Bryce workspace — tool palettes, a preset rail, a nano preview, full-screen labs.
• Offline and client-side. Nothing is fetched; the terrain is generated on your machine.

There’s also an early sketch of “Muse,” a REPL-first scene DSL (Poplog-inspired) that can drive the UI by description, with optional text/STT parsing and tiered LLM backends.

Why the Pi 5 matters

Burisu’s reference target is a Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB), and it gates releases — if a build won’t hit an acceptable frame rate on the Pi’s V3D GPU in browser-compat mode, it doesn’t ship. Chasing that target produced a genuinely useful WebGPU platform-notes catalog: x86-vs-Pi driver bugs, readback and presentation quirks, and testing traps that anyone shipping WebGPU to low-end hardware will run into.

Milestone M0 renders a slowly orbiting fractal landscape today; the roadmap runs through M6 plus an AI milestone. Source and full design docs on github.com/IoTone.