How the calm is measured
In ADdes, intensity comes from colour, detail and depth, never from flashing, strobing or sudden motion. The limits are numbers, and a test fails if one is broken.
Why there is a budget
Electric Sheep’s forms evolved slowly and lulled you into a trance. That is the quality ADdes is built to keep, so it is written down as hard limits called the Trance Budget, and every phase of work ends with a clean run against them.
Nothing flashes. Nothing jumps. Audio can only make the dream breathe, never strobe.
Deep Trance, recorded from the app.
The Trance Budget: what a build is not allowed to do
| Rule | The limit | Why it serves you |
|---|---|---|
| No flashes | 0 general flashes. The web standard for flashing, WCAG 2.3.1, allows 3. | No flashing, ever, for you and for anyone you share it with. |
| No pumping | The screen’s average brightness changes by no more than 0.03 over any second. | No perceptible brightness pumping, even with energetic music. |
| No local strobing | No patch of the screen changes its average brightness by more than 0.10 over half a second. | A corner of the picture can’t flicker either. |
| No glare | 0 frames with more than 15% of pixels at full white. | Luminous, never blown out. |
| Slow motion | Pan at most 2% of the screen height a second. Zoom at most 3% a second. Rotation at most 4° a second. | Slow, trance-like motion, guaranteed by construction. |
| Colour flows | Hue drifts at most 3° a second. | Colour moves, but never restlessly. |
| Nothing sudden | A dissolve from one dream to the next never takes less than 8 seconds. | Nothing ever jumps. |
| Audio only breathes | No more than 5% of the movement in any music-driven setting is faster than 2 times a second. | Music tints the dream. It does not drive it. |
These are the project’s own yardsticks, one for each row.
The worst case, measured
One run, the same every time: ten minutes, headless and deterministic, through the real graphics pipeline, with a synthetic energetic 128 BPM track pushing the dream as hard as music can.
| What was measured | Largest value | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Brightness change over a second | 0.0161 | 0.03 |
| Brightness change in any patch over half a second | 0.0376 | 0.10 |
| Flashes | 0 | 0 |
| Speed limits broken | 0 | 0 |
These figures are from the three confirmation runs of the iteration 2 build, recorded in the project’s yardstick log. The app has changed since. Each phase of work ends with a fresh run, and the log is where the newest numbers live.
Measure this page on your own screen
The small dream below is held to the same rule. A meter reads its average brightness four times a second, and charts how much that changed over the last second, against the limit.
This meter reads the brightness of this one picture, not of your whole screen, and it measures the website’s small dream, not the app. It uses the same idea as the app’s own check.
6.5 breaths a minute
The dream breathes as one: the view swells, the light pulses and the glow swells. This is that pace.
It is a rhythm, not a promise about what it will do for you. ADdes is not a meditation app. Read why.
Visualizer Mode has its own, looser rules
With Visualizer Mode on, the dream is meant to dance, so the budget’s caps on brightness change, motion, colour drift and audio do not apply. What stays is a flash floor that no slider can move: no more than 3 general flashes in any second, the WCAG limit, and the mode rations itself to 2. It is tested with Intensity at 100% and Speed at 3×, and the pass mark is zero violations. With the mode off, everything on this page holds as before.
Visualizer Mode over a dance track, recorded from the app.
What a test cannot judge
Comfort is measured where it can be, and judged by you where it can’t. Nausea can’t be tested by a program: your body is the final yardstick. So defaults start gentle, and the controls let you go further, never the other way round. On a PC, Space holds the dream still at once, and the PC window’s keys keep working while you wear the headset.
The flash limit is a design target that a test enforces. It is not medical advice. If you have photosensitive epilepsy, or any doubt, speak to your doctor before watching moving light, from ADdes or anything else.