Insect World: An Interactive Field Guide Where 63 Insects Are Generated Entirely...

In the Swarm Yard of this city the insects are never pinned to a board. Insect World is an interactive 3D field guide where all sixty three species are generated by code at the moment you open them. There is not a single model file in the repository. Every exoskeleton, every wing, every set of legs is built from TypeScript and Three.js while the page runs.

The species range wider than your school textbook. Twenty eight beetles, five flies, five butterflies and moths, five wasps and bees, four true bugs, four orthopterans, dragonflies, mantises, lacewings and cockroaches. A beetle can run to 35,732 triangles; the northern house mosquito sits at 13,308. Each one assembles in the browser in thirty to ninety milliseconds, and the whole first load stays around 424 KB gzipped.

Eight species carry a full life cycle in the same code. The monarch ecloses on screen, its wings inflating from a crumpled pad by haemolymph pressure, and that animation is the recorded output of the live site, not a hand-drawn sequence. The Japanese rhinoceros beetle moves from creamy grub to a pupa that already shows the horn. The sacred dung beetle keeps egg and larva inside a brood pear. The same geometry that draws the adult also draws its egg, its larva and its pupa.

The craft shows in the deliberate choices. A honeybee really beats its wings at 230 Hz, which a sixty frame screen cannot show without aliasing, so the builder compresses the numbers into four to twelve Hertz and keeps the ordering between species intact. There is no walk cycle because a striding insect on a turntable reads as a treadmill, and hovering is the one motion that truly stays put. The Odonata beat fore and hind wings in antiphase, which is the giveaway that you are looking at a dragonfly.

Two themes stage the same collection. The Specimen Table is the day mode, cool grey-green archival boards with bronze nameplates. The Museum at Night drops the lights, lifts specimens out of darkness with spotlight cones, and lets metallic elytra and the firefly lantern read on a deep ground. A guided walkthrough moves the camera to whatever part is being described, and the quiz marks answers, explains them and keeps score. Four thousand tests pin the geometry down.

The text is written and machine translated in places, and the author openly flags that the biology has not been checked against entomology literature entry by entry, so treat it as a readable introduction rather than a citation. The source is MIT licensed and open at github.com/xr843/insect-world, with the live guide running at insect-world.pages.dev.

■ Filed from Swarm Yard: the Insects, Air wing of the city.