What is this?

This tool/toy/demo is a way to navigate all 16 777 216 colors in the RGB color space. You are navigating a 256x256x256 cube, and based on your position, the background color is calculated. You can navigate the space just like you would navigate any 3D space in a videogame. Move your mouse to look around and use wasd to walk. You can also press E to go up, and Q to go down, and hold shift to move 5 times faster. Essentially, the more west you are, the more red you add. The more south you are, the more green you have. And the higher you are, the more blue component is in the color.

Why does this have to be so complicated? Can't you just display all the colors in a 2D image?

Well, colors are 3 dimensional. Most of the color representations have 3 components (like RGB, HSL or HSV). A picture is just 2D, so it is not really possible to nicely show a 3 dimensional entity such as color in it.

What are those floating texts all around?

Some of the over 16 million colors have names (such as "red", "turquoise" or "cerise"). For this project, I used a list of 2330 color names that I found here: https://github.com/jonathantneal/color-names . The color name not only is in the color it describes, but is at precisely the point in space where it matches its color. When you reach a certain color name, the background will have the corresponding color.

This page is best viewed on desktop Chrome. It probably won't be operable on mobile browsers, and probably will be slow on Safari.

Do you have source code on GitHub?

Sure: https://github.com/BoltKey/color-journey