Every wingbeat leaves a trace.
A wingbeat. A rise. A turn.
Life leaves a trail.
as a living cloud of particles.
Follow a real butterfly.
Its body rises. Its wings fold and open. Follow the captured movement, one particle at a time.
Loading the published butterfly flight measurements.
Flight motion: Chen et al., MIG 2022. Published recordings include marker reconstruction and smoothing. The particle surfaces are illustrative.
The motion
comes from life.
A recorded body position sets the path. Two forewing markers drive the wing planes. Thousands of particles make the movement visible.
Explore the capture method ↗The rise and turn of the body.
The measured rhythm of flight.
Scattered silver particles, softly forming wings.
A closer look at living motion.
Explore short flight segments captured from five Papilio polytes butterflies.
See the wingbeat
Slow the recording to 0.1× and follow the body's movement between wing strokes.
Trace the flight
Inspect the recorded thorax and wing paths, frame by frame, in three dimensions.
Go back to the measurements
Find the original dataset, paper, coordinate mapping, and reproducible conversion.
Real movement. Visible structure.
The paths come from butterflies. Body and wing positions come from the authors’ published, processed motion-capture dataset. Each short recording is replayed individually, with a marked restart.
The particle skin is an interpretation. Wing volumes, hindwings, legs, and antennae are constructed for this visualization. Three markers do not provide a complete anatomical scan.