TELEGRAPHInstruction manual · telegrapher.work

Opening the studio begins with a small ceremony: a seeded handful of emoji spread across a sphere in three dimensions, their voxels drawn in one by one around the full 360° while your first entropy harvest runs — tap to skip. Then: Telegrapher turns entropy, words, equations, images — even your live screen — into structured 3D objects you can light, paint on, animate, and export for 3D printing. Everything runs in your browser. This page is the full manual; the studio itself is one file away.

1 · Quick start

  1. Open the studio and press Harvest Entropy — Telegrapher samples timing noise from your device and folds it into a seed.
  2. Press Render From Seed. A structure appears. Drag to rotate, pinch or scroll to zoom.
  3. Try the style menu: Lattice, Orbs, Crystal, Kaleidoscope, Solid…
  4. Type a word into the text box and press Hash Text → Seed — the same text always rebuilds the same object.
  5. Open Import / Export, choose STL or 3MF, press Export, and send it to your slicer.
Deterministic is on by default: a seed is a promise. Share the seed (or a tiny .vobj recipe) and anyone can regrow your exact object.

The header row is the fast lane:

  • Draw — toggles Voxel Paint (section 6) and opens its panel.
  • Light Settings — enters lighting adjust mode with lamp figures, the metallic reference cube, and an unlocked camera (section 7).
  • Manual — opens this page.
  • Hide Jitter — collapses the entropy column for a bigger viewport.
  • Full Screen — the viewport takes the whole display.
  • contact · x@telegrapher.work — mail the studio directly.

Every control lives in a collapsible section on the left: Draw, Lighting, Agent Console, Structure / Seed / Text, View / Telegraph Graph, Import / Export / Packaging. On phones the panels become a single reorderable stack.

3 · Seeds: entropy, text & keys

Everything begins with a 32-bit seed:

  • Entropy harvest — multi-threaded timing jitter from your own device, drawn as a waveform. No two harvests match.
  • Text — any words, emoji, or equations are hashed to a seed. Multi-line text is supported; Ctrl/Cmd + Enter renders.
  • To / From keys — the dual-seed field mixes a sender and receiver key, so a pair of people share objects nobody else can regrow.

Fold count sets rotational symmetry, density sets how much material grows, depth sets vertical spread or thickness. Uncheck Deterministic to roll fresh variations of the current settings.

4 · The nine styles

StyleWhat it builds
latticeWireframe segment field folded into kaleidoscopic symmetry — airy, luminous scaffolds.
orbsThe same field rendered as glowing node clouds.
crystalA displaced, faceted solid — mineral forms with vertex-color gradients.
kaleidoTrue mirror kaleidoscope, 2D mandala plate or 3D volumetric. Section 5.
solidPrintable mass. With a photo loaded it becomes a relief mold (recessed image, entropy back).
depictReads your text and builds the thing it names from a primitive glossary — or renders unknown text as a document sculpture.
textRaised block type and emoji as printable relief tiles, with justification and fill modes.
telegraphThe calculator style: numbers and equations become graph structures (section 11).
reliefAny image as a color voxel heightfield (section 8).

The tenth option, No change, keeps whatever is on screen — imports, edits, drawings — untouched while you adjust other settings.

5 · Kaleidoscope (2D / 3D)

The Kaleidoscope style is a genuine mirror instrument, not a texture. Shards — orbs, splinters, petals — are seeded into a half-wedge, reflected, then repeated around the circle for 2 × fold mirror symmetry, exactly like the tube toy.

  • Kaleidoscope form appears under the style menu: 3D volumetric (equator-mirrored, with a core) or 2D flat mandala sitting on a printable backing plate — a coaster or medallion straight off the slicer.
  • Fold count = mirror segments. Density = shard count. Depth = thickness (2D) or vertical spread (3D).
  • With a photo loaded, shard colors are sampled from the image itself — your picture, kaleidoscoped. Load a photo (or share your screen, section 9), then pick Kaleidoscope.

Everything merges into one vertex-colored mesh, so it renders fast and exports clean to every mesh format.

6 · Draw — Voxel Paint

MS Paint, except the canvas is a plane floating in the object's space. Press Draw in the header (or the toggle in the Draw panel):

  • A ghost grid shows the active drawing plane. Drag to paint voxels; right-click drags — or the Eraser toggle — remove them.
  • Plane chooses your canvas: XY (facing you), XZ (floor plan), YZ (side profile). Layer slides that canvas along its normal in voxel steps.
  • Voxel size (2–12), brush width (1–4), color, and opacity (10–100%) shape the stroke. Semi-transparent voxels read as tinted glass.
  • Undo steps back per stroke (60 levels); Clear drawing is itself undoable.
Build in 3D the way a graffiti writer builds a wall: block in a layer, move the Layer slider, add the next. Or paint with Draw off-and-on, rotating the object between passes — the paint is part of the structure, so it spins, scales, and exports with it.

Drawn voxels ride along in every mesh export — STL, 3MF, OBJ, PLY, GLB, glTF. A .vobj recipe records only procedural settings, so export a mesh format to keep drawn art.

7 · Lighting, streaks & floor

  • Light Settings mode shows every lamp as a physical figure — shade, glowing bulb, beam — aimed at your object, plus a metallic reference cube and an unlocked camera (zoom 40–1600).
  • Adjust each lamp's brightness (0–3×), color, azimuth, elevation, distance; add spotlights; give any lamp a lens flare that persists outside the mode.
  • Draw light streaks: with the streak tool on, drag across the viewport to paint ribbons of light in space. The first six streaks genuinely illuminate the object. Streaks follow the object's rotation.
  • Shadow floor (View panel) places a soft ground plane under everything: the object, your voxel painting, the streaks — with real cast shadows.

8 · Photos, molds & reliefs

  • Load a photo (camera or file). It becomes a color voxel relief; the image itself also hashes into the seed.
  • Relief style = the image standing as a heightfield. Solid style + photo = a printable mold: the image pressed into a block, with an entropy-textured back so every mold is individually marked.
  • Image wraps, mirror modes, bubble domes, and triangle-pyramid detection live in the image surface panel.
  • Jitter and scramble operate on the loaded image too — section 10.

9 · Live sources — screen share & camera

In Import / Export, press Share screen into the viewer and pick a window, tab, or display. Telegrapher captures it into the same pipeline as a photo:

  • Capture frame freezes the current screen into the relief.
  • Live update re-captures about every 1.6 seconds — the object tracks whatever your screen is doing.
  • Everything that works on a photo works on the feed: molds, wraps, jitter, scramble, entropy backs, and the kaleidoscope's image-sampled colors. Share a video call, switch to Kaleidoscope, and watch it refract.

Camera → object · the entropy effector

  • Open camera into the viewer (next to screen share) puts your live camera through the same pipeline — capture stills or let live update run it as a mirror. Flip switches front/back; the front camera is mirrored naturally.
  • The entropy effector slider (default 12%) disturbs each frame with your device's own harvested jitter: pixel drift, brightness shimmer, and — at higher settings — rare phosphor sparks. 0% is a clean feed; 100% is a storm. Every live frame shimmers differently, so the object breathes.
  • One live source runs at a time — starting the camera stops screen share, and vice versa.
Screen and camera capture need a secure context (https, or localhost) and always ask your permission. Nothing leaves the page — frames are downsampled in memory, never uploaded.

10 · Editing on the graph

  • Select mode lets you tap voxels or models on the graph; grow/shrink selections, recolor, or delete.
  • Scramble re-rolls positions while keeping the palette; jitter nudges everything by entropy; snap re-grids it.
  • Imported models can be scaled, mirrored, and stacked with generated structures, then exported as one piece.

11 · The telegraph calculator

The Telegraph style treats the text box as a calculator: numbers, arithmetic, and functions are parsed and plotted as physical graph structures — number lines, bar fields, surfaces. Type sin(x)*40 or 7×13 and render. The result is a printable object that is the calculation.

12 · Importing files

The importer reads about thirty formats and turns each into structure:

  • 3D: GLB, glTF, STL, OBJ, PLY, 3MF, VOBJ, Three.js JSON, blueprint ZIPs.
  • Images: PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF → color reliefs.
  • SVG: drawn in 3D — every vector path is sampled and traced stroke by stroke as solid printable tubes, with a depth style of your choice: entropy depth (paths float and wave), flat plane, or wrapped 360° around a cylinder. Adjustable stroke thickness; a paste box accepts raw markup; an Example: draw the Earth button wraps a world map into a 360° globe; switchable back to rasterize-as-relief. SVG drawings regrow from their recipe, so they travel as telegram codes — and agents can generate vector art and call draw_svg to see it drawn.
  • Documents: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TXT, MD → page sculptures and data structures.
  • Audio & video: waveform ridges and frame reliefs.
  • Anything else: raw bytes become entropy — every file has a shape.

13 · Exporting & printing

FormatUse it for
PNGA rendered image of the current view.
STLClassic 3D printing mesh.
3MFUnit-aware print mesh with fill metadata — the best choice for modern slicers.
OBJ / PLYUniversal meshes; PLY keeps vertex colors.
GLB / glTFCompact shareable 3D for viewers, AR, and game engines.
VOBJA tiny JSON recipe — seed + settings. Kilobytes that regrow the whole object.
Three.js JSONExact scene data.
Blueprint ZIPThe full package: VOBJ + renders + part meshes + a build spec.

Master scale and hollow-conduit options apply at export time, so one design can print at pendant or centerpiece size.

Every export ends with a share prompt: save or open the file, mint a telegram code, or post straight to X, WhatsApp, Reddit, Facebook, or email.

14 · Motion, GIFs & the recorder

  • Motion over time: set keyframes and export an animated GIF (12–120 frames, up to 480 px, optional transparency).
  • Turn recorder: capture the object spinning as a looping GIF.
  • Exported GIFs decode correctly everywhere, including phone galleries and messaging apps.

15 · Telegram codes — objects as messages

The telegram idea, completed: any object becomes a short code you can text to someone. They type it in — or tap your link — and the object regrows on their screen from its seed.

  • Open Telegram — Send / Receive Codes and press Send current object. The recipe (born from your jitter) is hashed into a deterministic code like JW58R-0DWD4 — the same object always mints the same code.
  • The recipe is hosted at /tvobj/CODE.tvobj and your share link is simply telegrapher.work/?t=CODE. Kilobytes stand in for megabytes: the code is the object.
  • Receiving: paste a code into the panel and press Regrow, or just open the link — the studio fetches the recipe and rebuilds it through Generate-From-Seed. Typos are forgiven (O→0, I/L→1).
  • No server yet? On static hosting the link automatically carries the packed recipe in the URL instead — longer, but it works anywhere. Codes go live the moment tvobj_server.py runs.
  • After every export a share prompt offers the same powers: get a telegram code, post to X, WhatsApp, Reddit, Facebook, email a friend, or use your device's native share sheet.
Codes carry recipes — procedural, text, telegraph, relief, and kaleidoscope objects travel perfectly. Voxel drawings and imported meshes don't ride in a recipe; export GLB to share those exactly.

16 · AI agents — the Telegrapher interface

Telegrapher is AI-operable. Any agent that can see this page — a browser agent, a console-capable assistant, or a person pasting JSON — gets a full structured toolset. No slider-clicking required.

Where agents find it

  • window.telegrapher.run(cmd) — the single entry point. cmd is {"tool": name, "arguments": {…}}, a JSON string, or an array of commands run in order. Every call returns JSON.
  • window.telegrapher.describe() and the DOM node #telegrapher-agent-manifest — the complete machine-readable tool manifest, embedded in the page itself so browsing agents can discover it.
  • The Agent Console panel — the same interface as a form: paste command JSON, press Run, read the result log. Two example buttons show a figure command and a voxel-art sequence.
  • window.generatePiece(opts) — the original one-call generator remains for direct scripting.

The tools

make_figure · modify_figure · rotate_figure · set_zoom · set_auto_rotate · draw_voxels · draw_line · draw_box · undo_drawing · clear_drawing · set_light · add_lamp · list_lamps · draw_streak · set_floor · set_adjust_lighting · export_figure · screenshot · get_state

Coordinates are documented in the manifest: Y is up, the origin is the object center, a typical figure has radius ≈ 110 units. Voxel tools take integer grid indices (world position = index × cell). Rotations are radians; colors are hex.

Teaching an agent to paint

{"tool":"make_figure","arguments":{"prompt":"night wall","style":"solid","palette":"deep"}}
{"tool":"draw_box","arguments":{"min":[-10,10,3],"max":[10,18,3],"color":"#111820"}}
{"tool":"draw_line","arguments":{"from":[-8,12,4],"to":[8,16,4],"color":"#3dffa0"}}
{"tool":"screenshot"}
{"tool":"export_figure","arguments":{"format":"glb"}}

That last loop — draw, screenshot, look, correct — is how an agent learns to write on a wall it can walk around. Ask your agent to sign its work; the paint exports with the piece.

Agents get generation, drawing, lighting, camera, and export. They do not get arbitrary code, your files, or the page source — the interface is the whole surface.

17 · Quick recipes

WantDo
a pendantText seed → Crystal → depth 30 → export 3MF at small master scale.
a photo moldLoad photo → Solid style → export STL, print in flexible filament.
a mandala coasterKaleidoscope → 2D → fold 10–14 → export 3MF.
image kaleidoscopeLoad photo (or screen share) → Kaleidoscope 3D → watch the colors.
voxel graffitiDraw on XY, shift Layer, keep going → floor + lamps → GLB.
secret shared objectTo/From keys with a friend → send the seed only.
an entropy mirrorCamera → live update → effector ~15% → watch yourself as jittered relief.
a living screen relicScreen share → live update → capture at the right moment → Solid.
object by textTelegram panel → Send → text the code to a friend.
agent artPoint any browser agent at the studio: "read the manifest and make me something."

18 · Privacy & contact

Telegrapher runs entirely in your browser. Entropy, photos, documents, and screen frames are processed locally and never uploaded. Exports download straight to your device.

Questions, commissions, ideas, agent experiments: x@telegrapher.work.

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