What is it?

DNVR Scale is a perspective view of length scales between the smallest thing possible to largest things measurable.

How do I use it?

Using the scale view is meant to be intuitive. You should already know how to do most things this implementation is capable of.

You can navigate the different orders of magnitude of length by scrollingdragging on the viewing area.

Swipe upward to view larger objects and downward for smaller objects.

If your PC has a mouse with a scrollwheel, you can use it for general navigation. You can navigate more precisely using the keyboard’s Up and Down arrow keys.

Holding Shift gives you finer control of the navigation, and CTRL or command or ALT.^∗

ClickingTapping on an object, which will quickly bring it into view, also shows you details about the object.

There are a few settings available in the Settings menu on the bottom right corner, which you can choose from to make your view as detailed or clutter-free as you like.

How does it work?

DNVR Scale makes use of the web’s de facto languages HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It works in every browser capable of handling the standards^†, mainly HTML5 custom elements, CSS3 and JavaScript 1.85.

All of the images and their sizes are represented in the markup of this document. When the document loads, this markup is interpreted by the in-page JavaScript program and perspective elevation styles of each of the elements are computed and inserted back into those elements. The CSS engine of the browser handles these style instructions and places every object at their intended locations on the scale.

Every time you scroll, the browser does a recalculation to determine what elevation should be displayed on the screen. In essence, it commandeers the process of vertical scrolling to simulate scrolling along the axis normal to the screen.

But they don’t all scale the same...

The images here are not in linear scale at any point in this simulation project, although any two objects in isolation can appear to be in proportion to the real world by co-incidence.

The normal axis is in a logarithmic scale. This means the gap between a metre tall object an a millimetre tall object is the same as a kilometre tall object to the metre tall one. Equidistant pairs of objects are in a geometric progression.

This is rather equivalent to a one point perspective drawing with the vanishing point at the infinitesimal. It is as if all objects were magically made the same size and then placed on this scale by ascending original size.