About VerkLabs

I’m a developer at heart.

When I wanted to dive headfirst into immersive, reactive 3D environments, I couldn’t find anything like CodePen or Shadertoy that would let me learn by building, tools that could teach me about node graphs, runsheets and real-time 3D scenes. So I did what developers do: I started building. Shaders, node compilers, rendering experiments, whatever it took.

I kept going.

Eventually I looked at what I’d built. Thousands of lines of code, all locked inside tools that only I could use.

And I realised I’d missed the point.

I had been looking for a place where beginners and experienced users could share ideas, experiment and learn from each other. Instead, I’d disappeared down my own technical rabbit hole and built something entirely for myself.

That was the beginning of VerkLabs.

Not a business plan. Not a pitch deck. Just the thought that if I built the thing I’d been looking for properly, easy to use, easy to share, and open for people to learn from, perhaps I could give other people what I had been missing.

That idea kept me working on it long after it stopped making sense as a side project.

The idea wasn’t entirely new. I’d long been fascinated by tools like TouchDesigner, which let people create extraordinary things with code, nodes and real-time graphics without necessarily thinking of themselves as programmers.

Then there was CodePen and Shadertoy. They showed me something important: the code and the result could live side by side, making other people’s work something you could open, experiment with, fork and learn from.

That was the tool I wanted to build.

So I started turning the hard-wired code and JSON files into something other people could actually use. I built interfaces for the WebGL rendering engine, the node compiler, the backend, AI integration. All of it.

And then came the moment when it all fell into place.

I was looking at a shader and node graph on one side of the screen, and the live 3D result on the other, both running in the browser. I realised: this was it. This was the tool I had been looking for, something like CodePen for real-time reactive graphics.

The first real test came at a workshop at Nottingham Trent University. Watching students light up as they started making things, and hearing some of them say they wanted to use VerkLabs for their final projects, was the first time I felt that the idea had escaped my own head.

For the first time, I knew it wasn’t just a tool I’d built for myself. It was something other people could use to find their own way in.

VerkLabs is still early. There are rough edges, and it’s changing fast. That’s fine. I’m more interested in building something people can learn from, experiment with and make their own.

For VJs, generative artists, motion designers, educators, creative coders, and anyone who wants to make something with shaders and nodes.

If you’re building something interesting, I’d love to hear about it.

Jonas Almgren
Founder, VerkLabs · LinkedIn

Want to end up in TouchDesigner one day? See how VerkLabs gets you most of the way there — free, and in your browser.

Already write Shadertoy? See how to bring your existing code straight in.