Caustic09

A liquid-light laboratory

Nothing here is solid.
Including the light.

Light, behaving differentlyREFRACTION / LIVE

Drag slowly. Leave a little disturbance.
Keyboard: arrows move light · Space drops a ripple.

A real wave field. A little optical mischief. Move through it, then take a frame home.

HTML + CSS + JS / NO DEPENDENCIES
Under the surface. The idea, the maths & the source ↙
Simple rules. Unexpected light.

A surface remembers
where you have been.

Two floating-point textures exchange height and velocity. Each point feels its four neighbours; your pointer adds an impulse. The resulting height gradient bends the poster underneath it. Red, green, and blue sample slightly different positions to imitate dispersion. Procedural highlights suggest concentrated light; this is an artistic optical model, not a ray-traced fluid solver.

Download the complete working source ↓ 
laplacian = left + right + above + below - 4 * height;
velocity = (velocity + laplacian * 0.24) * damping;
height += velocity;

normal = gradient(height);
refractedUV = uv + normal * refraction;
colour = sampleRGB(poster, refractedUV, dispersion);

The ZIP includes this exact live experiment: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, both shaders, shared runtime, a README and MIT licence. Unzip, open caustic/index.html, and play. No account, CDN, install or build step.