
Free
Rating summary
About
Every shadow in this app is computed, not painted.
Most science apps show you a picture of a shadow. Shadow Smart Lab gives you the light source and gets out of the way. Drag the lamp across the sky and the shadow stretches. Turn the object and the outline changes. Widen the source and the edge goes soft. The maths runs live, sixty times a second, on the actual geometry of the solid in front of you.
A REAL LIGHTING ENGINE, NOT A SPRITE
Eight procedural solids: cube, sphere, pyramid, cylinder, cone, torus, prism and arch
Every vertex ray-projected from the lamp onto the ground plane, so rings keep their holes and arches keep their gap
Penumbra width driven by real source size and distance, exactly like a physical soft box
Add a second lamp and get a second shadow, with the overlap resolved correctly
Four materials, including translucent glass that thins its own shadow
SIX TOPICS, TAUGHT BY EXPERIMENT
● Shadow length: why noon shortens you and evening stretches you, and where 1 / tan comes from
● Shadow direction: reading a bearing off the ground and turning any stick into a compass
Eclipses: a full simulator with angular radii, so you can drive the Moon out to apogee and watch a total eclipse turn annular
Silhouettes: why a backlit subject loses everything except its outline
Reflection: a law-of-reflection bench where roughness morphs one clean ray into a diffuse spray
Perspective: vanishing points, and why a shadow grows as the object approaches the lamp
LEARN, THEN PROVE IT
30 lessons, each with its own live animated diagram rather than a static illustration
30 quiz questions with explanations, five per topic
21 challenges across three difficulties: hit a target shadow length, bearing, orientation or softness
Difficulty changes the tolerance and hides the live numbers, so Advanced makes you estimate
A new seeded daily experiment every morning
FIVE PLACES TO WORK
Laboratory, Desert, Forest, Space and City at Night
Each has its own sky, ground, ambient fill, source softness and reflectivity, so the same object behaves differently in each
BUILT TO FEEL GOOD
Full dark and light themes, plus system
Glassmorphic panels, animated backgrounds and a cinematic-motion switch for anyone who wants it calmer
Subtle haptics on every control, switchable
Progress, streaks, levels, 16 achievements and charts of where your mastery actually sits
No account. No subscription. No network. Everything runs on device.
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What's New in Shadow Smart Lab
1.0
August 31, 2026









