This version was made with Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. It's a 3D zoom that splits 62 orders of magnitude, from the observable universe (10²⁷ m) to the Planck length (10⁻³⁵ m), into 26 scenes, and lets you descend through them seamlessly with nothing but the mouse wheel. From Earth on, like the other versions, it anchors on Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, and goes into the tip of the index finger of a person waving in the square.
The focus was on joining one scene to the next
In a zoom that crosses orders of magnitude, the most awkward moment is when the scene changes. Instead of overlaying the next scene on top, this version makes the next scene inherit what the previous scene already has.
- Earth → Korean Peninsula: The peninsula scene uses the same cloud map as the globe, at the same position and the same speed. As you descend, the clouds clear, starting over Seoul.
- Korean Peninsula → Seoul → Gwanghwamun: From high up, the colors of the Seoul satellite image are matched to the tone of the peninsula imagery, and return to their own colors as you descend. Around Gwanghwamun, the ground first looks exactly like the surrounding imagery, and then the buildings rise up out of it.
- Hand → Skin: The fingerprint carved into the fingertip and the fingerprint in the skin cross-section scene use the same function and the same coordinate system, so the pattern carries straight through as you zoom in. The cross-section opens gradually from the edges.
- Skin → Cell: The cell scene continues the skin cross-section drawing at micrometer scale, with a single cell embedded half cut away in its basal layer.
Seoul drawn from real data
The sky over Seoul and the Gwanghwamun area aren't a procedurally invented city; they're real data. The satellite imagery is a Sentinel-2 mosaic, the terrain is SRTM elevation data, and about 25,000 buildings plus roads and parks come from OpenStreetMap, moved into coordinates centered on Gwanghwamun. For buildings with no floor count, height is estimated from use and floor area, and the halls of Gyeongbokgung Palace and the hanok (traditional Korean houses) of Bukchon and Seochon have tiled roofs.
The fingertip, and the empty atom
The hand has the three main palm creases and the knuckle creases, fingerprints on the fingertips, skin texture and veins on the back of the hand, and nails with a lunula and free edge. Each only appears once you're close enough, so the fine patterns never look broken from a distance. Inside the atom, carbon's 1s electron cloud lies like a faint mist, and the deeper you go, the rarer the sparkles of an electron being "found" become, showing how empty an atom is.
From quark to Planck length, a desert of 17 orders of magnitude
Below the quark there is no known structure, so the screen easily goes empty. In this section, glowing gateways stand at each meaningful size: the limit the LHC has probed (10⁻¹⁹ m), the jitter of the mirrors in the gravitational-wave detector LIGO, the measured upper bound on the size of the electron, the wavelength of the "Oh-My-God" cosmic-ray particle observed in 1991, the seed of the universe according to inflation theory, the grand unification scale, and the order of a string in string theory. Values that are hypothetical or vary widely between models are labeled as such. The vacuum in the background follows the fact that energy rises as size shrinks: from gentle ripples in a quantum field, through boiling pairs of virtual particles, to the spacetime foam of the Planck length.
English version
You can switch languages with the KO/EN button on the start screen and in the bottom-right corner. The info cards, 3D labels and even unit notation all switch to English, and you can open it directly at /scale_opus5.5?lang=en. If your browser language isn't Korean, it opens in English from the start.
Scale check
I re-measured the 3D models in each scene and the figures in the descriptions, and made them agree. Compression meant to spread out the nearby stars nicely had placed them closer than they really are (Alpha Centauri, 2.99 → 4.37 light-years); I corrected that. I also re-checked and fixed figures and comparison sentences like the Great Attractor (about 200 million light-years), Voyager 1 (about 172 AU in 2026) and the density of the atomic nucleus.
Data sources
- Earth and Korean Peninsula satellite imagery: NASA Blue Marble / Black Marble
- Seoul satellite imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless 2021 by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2021), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Terrain: SRTM and other public elevation data (AWS Terrain Tiles)
- Buildings, roads, green space: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
This version, and the others
The same scale ladder also exists as Scale Opus 5, made with Claude Opus 5; SCALE ASTRA, made with GPT Astra; and Scale Gemini 3.6 and Scale Gemini 3.8, made with Gemini. It's fun to put them side by side and see how each AI solves the same problem differently.