WebGPU · WASM

Burisu (ブライス)

A browser-native remake of the classic KPT Bryce 3D landscape generator — Rust compiled to WASM, rendered with WebGPU, tuned to run on a 4GB Raspberry Pi 5.

Source on GitHub Read launch story

What it is

Burisu (ブライス) reimagines KPT Bryce — the 1990s fractal-landscape program that a generation of artists used to render alien terrain and impossible skies — as a modern, fully client-side web app. The engine is written in Rust, compiled to WASM, and renders through WebGPU in the browser. No install, no cloud, no Node runtime required to view it.

How it works

A Rust engine built on wgpu handles the scene model, procedural terrain generation, and a progressive ray-traced renderer. A TypeScript/Svelte UI shell recreates the spirit of the original Bryce workspace — tool palettes, a preset rail, a nano preview, and full-screen “labs.” Everything runs locally and works offline.

The project also sketches “Muse,” a REPL-first scene DSL (Poplog-inspired) with optional text/STT intent parsing and tiered LLM backends for driving the UI by description.

The constraint that shapes it

The Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB) is the reference target, and it gates releases. If a build doesn’t hit an acceptable frame rate on a Pi 5’s V3D GPU in browser-compat mode, it doesn’t ship. That constraint drove a whole catalog of WebGPU platform notes — x86-vs-Pi driver bugs, readback/presentation quirks, and testing traps — that are useful to anyone shipping WebGPU to low-end hardware.

Status

Active, early. Milestone M0 (“hello terrain”) renders a slowly orbiting fractal landscape; the roadmap runs through M6 plus an AI milestone. Requires a WebGPU-enabled browser. Source and design docs (FSD, UX plan, implementation roadmap) are on github.com/IoTone.