Black Hole Sim: Live Wallpaper

Look into a black hole. A real one, ray traced live on your phone, and now on your home screen.

BlackHole is a black hole simulator built on real general relativity. Every pixel is a light ray traced backwards through the curved spacetime of a spinning (Kerr) black hole on your GPU, so the shadow, the gravitationally lensed accretion disk and the photon ring respond instantly as you change the mass, the spin and the disk. It is the same thin, lensed disk look made famous by the film Interstellar, computed from the equations rather than drawn.

NEW: LIVE WALLPAPER, 4K POSTERS AND ORBIT VIDEOS
– Set the black hole as an animated live wallpaper, in exactly the look you tuned in the app
– Export a supersampled 4K poster (3840 px, 500 ray steps, 16-pass anti-aliasing)
– Render a 12-second 1080p orbit video, a full 360° fly-around, to share anywhere
– A focus timer (Pomodoro) that runs over the simulation

FREE
– The live simulator: drag to orbit, pinch to zoom, adaptive resolution tuned to your device
– Mass and spin, plus every accretion-disk control: size, density, temperature, thickness and rotation speed
– Effect switches: lensing, Doppler beaming, photon ring, stars, jets and a gravitational-redshift view
– Low, Medium and High quality
– Four one-tap scenarios: Stellar, Sgr A* proxy, Maximal Spin and Schwarzschild
– Two guided lessons: the shadow and gravitational lensing
– Live readouts of the event horizon, photon sphere and ISCO from a Rust relativity engine, with every equation and its citation
– Save the screen to your gallery

BLACKHOLE PRO
– Live wallpaper for your home screen
– 4K poster and orbit video export
– Ultra and Cinematic ray tracing: up to 500 geodesic steps per pixel
– Six more scenarios: M87* as imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, a film-style thin disk, retrograde spin, Cygnus X-1, a quasar and a bare lensed shadow
– Six more lessons: Doppler beaming, gravitational redshift, frame dragging, the innermost stable orbit, disk temperature and relativistic jets
– Focus timer and studio tuning (lensing, frame drag, bloom, camera auto-spin)

Get Pro once with the Lifetime unlock, or yearly with a free trial week for new subscribers.

THE PHYSICS
– Kerr-Schild geodesic ray marching with frame dragging
– Page–Thorne and Novikov–Thorne accretion disk with relativistic Doppler beaming and blackbody colour
– Horizon, photon sphere and ISCO from the Bardeen, Press and Teukolsky formulas
– Hand-written Vulkan renderer with temporal anti-aliasing, bloom and ACES tone mapping

No ads, no tracking, no account. Runs entirely offline.

Developed by John Seong at Orch Aerospace, Inc. Includes MIT-licensed open-source work by Mayank Pratap Singh.

Recent changes:
New in BlackHole 1.3: set the black hole as a live wallpaper, export 4K posters and 360° orbit videos, and run a focus timer over the simulation (Pro). A redesigned home screen with the equations panel, a welcome tour, an About page and a clearer paywall. Pro also comes with a discounted first year for new subscribers.