Acko.net: Where Math and Graphics Get Explained in WebGL

Acko.net is what happens when someone who builds graphics engines decides that a static diagram is an insult to the reader. It is the personal site of Steven Wittens, it has been running for many years, and its central conviction is that if you can render the idea in three dimensions and let the reader drag it around, you should.

What is Acko.net?

Most technical writing about math and graphics has the same failure mode. The prose describes a transformation, the figure shows one frozen instant of it, and the gap between those two things is exactly where the reader gets lost. Acko.net closes that gap by making the figure move.

The articles are long, and the visualizations are not decorations bolted on afterward. They are the argument. A piece on how complex numbers fold into a Julia fractal shows you the folding, step by step, with the intermediate states you would otherwise have to imagine. A series on generating procedural planets walks through the actual mesh, the actual noise, the actual seams, rather than showing a finished screenshot and hand-waving the middle.

That capability is not an accident of good tooling; the author built the tooling. MathBox is his library for producing animated, presentation-grade mathematical figures in WebGL, and it is the reason the diagrams on the site look like they escaped from a very well-funded documentary. Later work moves down the stack into Use.GPU, a rendering approach built on modern GPU APIs, and the site documents that reasoning at length too.

The other half of Acko.net is opinionated software writing. Posts on rendering architecture, on why certain abstractions in graphics and UI code keep collapsing, on the failure modes of frameworks. These are argumentative rather than tutorial, and they assume the reader can keep up. Some of them are the kind of thing you disagree with for three paragraphs and then concede.

Even the site itself is a demonstration. The header is a live WebGL scene rather than a hero image, which on any other blog would be showing off, and here is simply the house style.

What can you do with Acko.net?

• Read the interactive math articles. Drag, rotate and step through the figures instead of squinting at a still image and reconstructing the motion in your head.
• Work through the fractal and quaternion explanations. They cover the classic “why does this rotate that way” confusion with visuals that actually resolve it.
• Follow the procedural world-building series. A practical account of generating planetary terrain, including the parts that go wrong.
• Study MathBox. If you write technical content yourself, it is a template for what browser-based math figures can look like.
• Dig into the rendering work. The Use.GPU material is a detailed look at how a modern GPU pipeline gets structured, written by someone building one.
• Read the software opinion pieces. Long, sharp essays on architecture and abstraction, with no interest in being diplomatic.
• View the source of the demos. The visualizations run in your browser, which means the implementation is right there to inspect.

Tips to get the most out of it

Use a desktop with a real GPU. The interactive figures are the entire point and they are heavy. On an old phone you get a degraded version of the experience and none of the benefit.

Interact with every figure. They look like images. They are not. If you scroll past one without grabbing it, you have just read the article with the explanation removed.

Read one article per sitting. These are not skimmable posts. Trying to consume three in a row produces the illusion of understanding and very little of the real thing.

Start with a topic you already half-know. The visualizations do their best work when they correct a fuzzy mental model you already have, rather than installing a new one from scratch.

Follow the internal links backward. Posts reference earlier posts, and the older articles frequently supply the groundwork the newer ones assume.

Treat the library docs as reading material. MathBox and Use.GPU are documented with the same explanatory instinct as the essays, so the reference material teaches as well as the blog does.

If you like Acko.net, also try…

• Bartosz Ciechanowski: the other great practitioner of the interactive-explainer form, on topics from gears to GPS.
• BetterExplained: math explained through intuition first and formalism second.
• Making Software: visual explanations of how the software you use every day actually works.
• WebGL Fluid Simulation: a reminder of how much your browser can render before breaking a sweat.

More things worth reading slowly in Learning & Education and Design & Creativity.