The Universe Is Beige
The story behind The Average of Everything
Inspired by Cosmic Latte on Wikipedia
Built with Three.js · ShaderMaterial · OrthographicCamera
Techniques Layered Simplex Noise · HSL-to-RGB Conversion · Mouse Trail System (32-point history) · Procedural Star Generation · Film Grain
Direction Start with the universe’s average color — beige — and let the cursor tear through it to reveal the layered noise-driven cosmos underneath
Result A Cosmic Latte (#FFF8E7) surface where cursor movement paints away the average, exposing flowing color fields, star points, and evolving hue cycles in real-time WebGL
The Story
In 2002, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University did something unusual. They collected spectral data from over 200,000 galaxies surveyed by the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, combined the light from every star and nebula and supernova captured in that dataset, and averaged it all together.
They were looking for the cosmic spectral energy distribution. What they found was a color.
The average color of the universe is beige.
They named it Cosmic Latte. Hex code #FFF8E7. The color of old paper. Coffee with too much cream. A shade so unremarkable that when they announced it, journalists struggled to make it interesting.
All those galaxies. All those explosions. All that beauty stretching across 13 billion years of cosmic history. Averaged into nothing remarkable.
The Take
Averages lie. They take the extraordinary and the ordinary, the brilliant and the dim, the violent and the peaceful, and reduce them to a single value that represents none of them accurately.
The universe contains blue giant stars and red dwarfs, golden nebulae and green quasars, the blinding white of supernovae and the absolute black of event horizons. It contains every color light can be. And when you average all of that together, you get… beige.
This experience starts with beige. The entire screen filled with Cosmic Latte, that profoundly average nothing-color. But your cursor is a disturbance. Where you move, the average breaks apart. Colors bloom. Saturation returns. The chaos that was averaged away reveals itself beneath the surface.
Move across the screen and watch the universe wake up. Let your trail fade and watch it settle back to beige. The average reasserts itself. The extraordinary gets absorbed.
But at least now you know it’s there.
The Tech
The experience uses Three.js with a custom GLSL shader that generates the hidden cosmos in real-time. Beneath the Cosmic Latte surface, multiple layers of Simplex noise create flowing, evolving color fields.
Three noise functions at different scales combine to create hue variation. The hue cycles slowly through the spectrum over time, giving the impression of cosmic evolution. Saturation and lightness get their own noise layers, creating regions of more and less vibrant color.
A fourth high-frequency noise layer generates occasional “star points” - bright white speckles that appear when the noise value crosses a threshold, simulating dense star fields glimpsed through the parting average.
The reveal effect uses a trail system. The shader receives an array of 32 past mouse positions, each with diminishing influence based on age. This creates the smeared, painted quality of the reveal - your cursor doesn’t just punch a hole in the average, it drags color behind it like a brush through wet paint.
HSL-to-RGB conversion happens in the shader for smooth, perceptually-uniform color transitions. The Cosmic Latte surface blends with the chaos layer based on reveal amount, with smoothstep functions creating soft edges at the boundary between average and reality.
The Experience
The screen begins beige. Cosmic Latte. The average of everything.
Move your cursor. Watch the color bloom beneath your touch. See the reds and blues and greens that astronomers averaged away when they calculated what the universe looks like “on average.”
Let your cursor rest. Watch the beige return. The extraordinary fading back into the ordinary. The signal disappearing into the mean.
This is what averaging does. This is what Cosmic Latte hides. And this is why the average of everything is the least interesting thing about anything.
Experience The Average of Everything
This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.