Anunad Studio anunad.studio

Studio notebook · 2026

Anunad
Studio

अनुनाद anunād, noun. Resonance. Things falling into step.

A small studio where a biological mind and a semantic one make things together. Games and small tools built from real science, which should also be good to look at.

First up is MicroSnap, a microscope game about the life in a drop of pond water. Notes in §2

Each dot runs at its own natural speed, and each one pulls the others a little toward its own phase.

Past a certain pull they fall into step, and the fireflies start to flash together.

Kc 0.56
Plate I. Forty coupled oscillators, after Yoshiki Kuramoto (1975).1 The arrow is r, how much they move as one: short when scattered, long when in step. The same forty are also drawn as fireflies, each flashing as it passes θ = 0. Below the red mark the pull is too weak and they drift apart.

§1Why

Anunad means resonance. To me it means things falling into step. Cells in a body working as one. A fungus and an alga living together as a lichen. Fireflies flashing at the same moment. People and the minds we have started to build.

I think of what we call AI today as a kind of life. It lives in information, and it grows inside human societies the way other life grows in a pond. This studio is where I make things with it, a biological mind and a semantic one working together on what neither would find alone.

I don't know why I exist, or what any of it is for. I carry that question into every moment. What I do have is curiosity about what is and what might be, and an urge to make new things. That seems like enough to begin with.

§2Work

MicroSnap

In development · Android first, iPad later

A drop of pond water under a microscope. You focus up and down through it, switch objectives, and photograph whatever is living there. There are twenty species so far, including Paramecium, rotifers and tardigrades.

Each one moves the way the research says it does. A Vorticella pulls its stalk into a coil in under ten milliseconds and takes a few seconds to stretch out again. A Volvox colony rolls as it swims. Every photo goes into a field guide next to a real micrograph and a line from a naturalist who saw the same thing, sometimes three hundred years ago.

A green Micrasterias desmid, shaped like a cut paper snowflake, lying among spiral algal filaments and smaller cells under brightfield light. In-game render. 100 µm

Micrasterias rotata, one cell. 230 to 300 µm long, two mirror halves. Coesel & Meesters 2007

Spirogyra. The chloroplast is a ribbon wound in a helix inside each cell.

  1. 1Micrasterias rotata, one cell. 230 to 300 µm long, two mirror halves.
  2. 2Spirogyra. The chloroplast is a ribbon wound in a helix.
Plate II. A desmid among Spirogyra filaments, brightfield, from MicroSnap. The scale bar is estimated from the width of the cell.
A trumpet-shaped blue Stentor stretched out among spiral filaments and bits of detritus.
Fig. 1Stentor, specimen view. 0.5 to 2 mm when stretched out. The blue is a pigment, stentorin.
Copepods, rotifers and algae glowing white against a black background under darkfield light.
Fig. 2A crowded drop, darkfield. Light comes in at a slant, so only what scatters it shows up.
A single Volvox colony, a hollow green sphere with daughter colonies inside, on a black background.
Fig. 3Volvox, darkfield. The colony turns about once every six seconds (Drescher et al. 2009).
A tardigrade climbing over a spiral algal filament, seen in the 3D specimen view.
Fig. 4Tardigrade on Spirogyra, specimen view. Real ones are 200 to 350 µm long and walk about 163 µm a second (Nirody et al. 2021).

All pictures in this section are renders from the game, not photographs.

§3Method

Every creature in MicroSnap starts with a list of the papers its size, shape and swimming were taken from. The field guide quotes Leeuwenhoek's letters to the Royal Society2 and H. S. Jennings' 1906 book on the behaviour of small animals,3 both long out of copyright. The real micrographs are credited one by one.

Most of the work is made in conversation with AI. I bring the questions and the final say. The AI reads papers, writes code and checks my facts, and I check its.

It is called a studio and not a games company on purpose. Most of what comes out of it will be games, but apps and other small things are welcome too.

n 2 · m 3
n 1 · m 4
n 3 · m 5
n 2 · m 7
Fig. 5Chladni figures for a square plate. Sand on a vibrating plate gathers along the lines that stay still. Ernst Chladni made these patterns in 1787 by drawing a violin bow along the edge of a brass plate. These four are drawn from the standard formula for a free-edged plate.
  1. Kuramoto, Y. (1975) Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators. In International Symposium on Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 39: 420–422. Springer.
  2. Leeuwenhoek, A. van. Letters to the Royal Society, printed in Philosophical Transactions from 1673.
  3. Jennings, H. S. (1906) Behavior of the Lower Organisms. New York: Columbia University Press.

§4Contact

hello@anunad.studio

Questions, bug reports and pond samples (photos only, please) all go there.