Optical interference / Study 02
Between the lines
An optical instrument made from two families of concentric circles. No textures, no images. Just lines, distance, and the patterns in between.
Paused
Move or drag to reposition the second set of rings. Adjust spacing and separation to find new interference patterns. Motion starts paused when your device requests reduced motion.
A look under the surfaceSimple rules.
Simple rules.
Unexpected results.
Moiré patterns emerge when two repeating structures overlap with a slight difference in position. Your eye reads their alternating dark and light regions as larger waves. The apparent depth is an interference effect; every mark here is a flat circle.
InterferenceSpatial frequencyEmergent geometry
The idea in code / JavaScript
for (let radius = spacing; radius < diagonal; radius += spacing) {
context.beginPath()
context.arc(centerX, centerY, radius, 0, Math.PI * 2)
context.stroke()
}rₙ = n · spacing; centre₂ = centre₁ + offset