About the glow
Glowworms is an onchain experiment in making NFTs that are physically brighter than
everything around them. Here's what's happening and how to see it properly.
How the glow works
Your screen treats pure white as a ceiling. That ceiling is called SDR white, and almost
everything you look at - websites, apps, this text - lives at or below it. But modern displays
can go far brighter; that extra headroom is usually reserved for HDR video highlights: the sun
glinting off water, a lightbulb in frame.
Bioluminescent glowworms are PNG files that claim that headroom. Each one carries a color
tag (a cICP chunk declaring the Rec.2100 PQ color system - the same one HDR movies use) and its
palette stores real luminance levels: a worm's body glows around 300 nits, auras reach 2,000,
and the hottest Radiant cores hit 4,000 - roughly ten to twenty times brighter than this page's
white. On an HDR display, the browser simply obeys.
The two-square test. The white square is your screen's maximum ordinary white. If
the worm's glowing spots clearly outshine it, you are seeing HDR right now.
…
Where the glow shows up
| Best | Chrome or Edge on an HDR screen: any MacBook Pro (2021+), recent iPhones
and iPads, OLED monitors and TVs, and most recent Windows laptops (turn HDR on in display
settings). |
| Live view | The animated view each worm carries on-chain asks the browser to
unlock full brightness (CSS dynamic-range-limit) - Chrome 136+ and recent Safari
respect it. |
| Discord | Inline previews are re-encoded by Discord's image proxy, which drops
the glow. The uploaded file itself keeps it: click the image, then "Open in Browser" to see
it glow in a Chrome tab. |
| LinkedIn | Keeps embedded color profiles when it re-encodes uploads. Use the
"HDR JPEG" export for a profile photo or company logo and it glows right in the feed. |
| X | Strips HDR on upload. Use the "SDR for X" export - it's tone-mapped by hand
so the colors survive. |
| macOS Preview | Decodes the file but ignores the HDR tag, so exports look flat
there. Open them in Chrome instead - Preview is lying to you. |
| SDR screens | Nothing breaks: the same file just renders tone-mapped. You see
correct colors at ordinary brightness, and the 🌟 badge tells you what you're missing. |
The Luminance clock
Every worm gets brighter the longer it is held. Each 91 days unlocks a stage, to a maximum
of four: aura rings bloom outward, Spacetime's gravity well deepens, Cosmic eyes grow twinkles,
Underglow pools spread. Transferring a worm resets its clock to zero. The twelve Radiant 1/1s
never diminish - stage 0 is their complete form, and holding only adds flourishes.
Fair by construction
All 10,000 trait combinations were generated, checked for uniqueness, and
committed on-chain before minting opened, fingerprinted by a published provenance hash. Minting
deals a random undealt combo via an on-chain shuffle - no duplicates are possible, nobody can pick what they get, and the census is exact. The art is CC0.