Backgrounds

The signature pro background: a viscous molten-bronze shader with amber crest highlights, ember-red troughs, a slow violet iridescence sweep, and a cursor heat-welt that swells the metal. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A sealed glass vessel of molten-metal spheres that tumble in and settle under a heat glow. Instanced rigid bodies, bloom, pointer stirring, offscreen-paused, and reduced-motion-safe.

A scroll-scrubbed tempering shader: white-hot amber turbulence at the top of the page cools through ember red into blued violet-steel with oxidation bands — and scrolling back genuinely reheats. GSAP ScrollTrigger drives an original OGL fragment shader, with idle micro-motion, custom phase keyframes, and a static mid-temper frame under reduced motion.

A cold night sky: three parallax layers of stars in icy white, pale blue, and rare cool violet over a blue-violet nebula lit from below, crossed by occasional downward-falling shooting stars with gravity-bent trails. Mouse and scroll parallax, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

An audio-reactive furnace: a horizon coal bed whose glow and flame-lick height follow amplitude, with bass strikes hurling ember volleys upward and treble adding spark flicker. Degrades to a gently breathing coal bed without audio — never black. Mic capture only behind an explicit user gesture, with full AudioContext and GL teardown on unmount.

A classic aurora: ribboned bands with a moving icy sheen on a near-black field, in teal, ice blue, and violet. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

An iron-filing field: a grid of short segments aligning to a slow magnetic-dipole field when idle and bending toward the cursor, brightening from silver to white. Original OGL fragment shader, one draw call, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A field of glowing embers rising from below in molten forge tones, each with its own phase, flicker, wind drift and color ramp; the cursor stirs a gentle updraft. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

An interactive dot grid: cool-steel silver dots heat white → cyan as the cursor approaches, with a configurable falloff curve. Freezes to a static, gently lit frame under prefers-reduced-motion.

A synthwave horizon: a perspective plane of glowing magenta grid lines scrolling toward the viewer, melting into a layered violet horizon bloom, with an optional slit-scanned cyan sun and faint star field. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A falling-ember background: a parallax field of hot embers, each an incandescent core in an additive-glow halo, stretched into a soft motion-blur streak as it drifts and flickers down. Near embers big/bright/fast, far ones dim/slow. 2D canvas with additive blending, seeded PRNG for deterministic spawn layout, honors prefers-reduced-motion.

A soft fluid gradient mesh: domain-warped fbm shader swirling slate, indigo, and violet fields in a slow cloud-like drift. Original OGL fragment shader, dithered, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Animated film-grain / noise overlay: fine, neutral-gray speckle that blends over any content via low opacity and mix-blend-mode, with an fps throttle for a slow, settled look and an optional warm tint knob.

An electric-storm background: seeded midpoint-displacement lightning bolts fork down from a faint cloud glow toward random ground points, drawn as layered strokes (wide glow, colored haze, white-hot core) with flicker re-strikes and afterimage persistence. Click to call a strike to your cursor. Photosensitivity-safe by design: shaped pulse trains (max 3 peaks, 130ms+ apart), a hard 1.25s strike cooldown, and a flashCap clamp on full-frame luminance. Canvas 2D, idle-silent between strikes, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion poster frame.

8-bit attract-mode background: a chunky pixel starfield drifting on three parallax depth layers, seeded space-shooter sprites gliding across on a two-frame flap, and a faint pixel grid receding to a horizon. Crisp unsmoothed pixels. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Volumetric god rays through drifting atmosphere: a light source anchored to a frame edge or corner pours a bundle of shafts into the dark, an angular noise mask slowly churns so individual beams brighten, split, and die like sun through smoke, and sparse dust motes twinkle only inside the lit volume. Inverse power-law bloom at the source, radial falloff keeping the far field text-safe, and a gentle searchlight re-aim toward the pointer. An original OGL fragment shader — DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, with a composed static frame under reduced motion.

A physics ballpit background in sea-glass celadon: frosted spheres pour in from a corner and drift under low gravity like objects underwater, jostling softly while the pointer stirs gentle currents. Instanced rigid bodies, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A centerpiece sphere of luminous plasma — the white-hot bloom drawn from a bloomery furnace. Layered fresnel shells wrap domain-warped turbulence convecting upward inside the volume, a molten seam migrates slowly across the surface, and a wide soft halo seats the orb in the dark. Hover leans the orb toward the cursor and quickens the convection; click sends a slow shockwave ripple crawling across the shell. Original OGL fragment shader with all fragment work bounded to the orb+halo region, tanh soft-clip tone mapping, position/size knobs for hero layouts, full palette control — DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, with a composed poster frame under reduced motion.

Dreamy out-of-focus lights: a parallax field of soft circular light discs — each with a brighter aperture rim — drifting slowly through the dark, sized and layered by depth like night lights through a defocused lens, with a few sharp in-focus specks. 2D canvas with additive blending, seeded PRNG for a deterministic scatter, pauses offscreen, honors prefers-reduced-motion with a still scatter.

Digital code rain: monospace glyph columns fall with bright white-hot heads and exponentially-fading cyan-steel trails, glyphs scrambling as the light passes, layered by depth. Pale-phosphor default (classic green is a preset). Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A CRT / VHS tube background: a synthetic phosphor signal rolls under dense scanlines while a slow vertical tracking bar sweeps down and shears the picture, the whole frame barrel-distorted into a bulging glass tube with a dark bezel, radial chromatic aberration, phosphor bloom, aperture-grille shimmer, and animated snow — all graded through a single phosphor tint. Original OGL fragment shader, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

The rippling light-caustic net on the floor of a sunlit pool: several octaves of drifting ridged noise thin into bright veins, and two decorrelated fields multiply so the web grows real caustic crossing-nodes, all undulating under a lapping surface ripple with a depth gradient and faint god-ray shafts. Cool aqua by default; slow, calm, premium. Original OGL fragment shader, tone-mapped, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

PCB-style data flow: orthogonal right-angle copper traces route between solder-pad nodes while glowing data packets stream along them, flaring each pad they reach into a hot bloom over a faint idle glow. Cool electric-aqua default, colors knob. Canvas 2D with a cached etch layer, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A metaball field: drifting cores fuse and split through smooth iso-surface blending, shaded as one mercury-chrome liquid with a circling glint and a silvery rim, the pointer riding along as an extra core. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

Celebration confetti: seeded chips and streamers fall under gravity with per-piece spin, tumble (foreshortening flip with a shadowed backface) and flutter. Opens with an upward burst on mount and keeps firing occasional puffs, then settles into a gentle endless drift. Festive-but-tasteful density, colors/speed/count knobs. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe (static settled scatter).

Living topographic map: marching-squares contour lines over an evolving 3D value-noise terrain, thin minor strokes with a bold accent index line every fifth level, over soft posterized elevation bands. Cool cartographic default. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, DPR-clamped, reduced-motion-safe.

A total solar eclipse: a black moon disk occludes a dead-center sun ringed by a white-hot corona of writhing radial streamers, a razor limb ring, and one warm diamond-ring bead drifting around the rim over a seeded starfield. Original OGL fragment shader, dithered, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A calm, magical night: warm glowing points drift along gentle seeded wandering paths, each softly breathing inside an additive-glow halo and trailing a short fading wake. Near fireflies big/bright/roaming, far ones dim pinpricks — real depth parallax. 2D canvas with additive blending, seeded PRNG for a deterministic SSR-safe layout, pauses offscreen, honors prefers-reduced-motion with a still field of glowing points.

Quantized pixel snowfall: chunky flakes locked to a crisp unsmoothed pixel grid fall on three parallax depth layers with distinct speeds, sizes and ice-blue tints. Per-flake sine wander, seeded wind gusts that shear layers by depth, and flakes that settle briefly into 1-block drifts on an invisible floor. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A comic pop-art Ben-Day dot field: three ink screens at classic offset-print angles, mis-registered for printed-comic fringing, their dot radii driven by a slow traveling wave so waves of dot-size ripple across a bold flat ground. Cursor sends a concentric pressure wave. Original OGL fragment shader, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Dye blooming through still water: a shared domain-warped fbm curls slow billowing folds while two inks bleed from drifting sources, pooling dense and dissolving into ragged tendrils with delicate luminous fronts, mixing into a pale bloom where they overlap. The pointer curls a soft eddy. Original OGL fragment shader, hard-dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A holographic foil sheet: a slowly raking light drives thin-film iridescence across a domain-warped oil-slick field, crossed diffraction micro-gratings split it into fine rainbow bands, and a soft specular bloom sweeps and leans toward the pointer for a tilt-shimmer, with glints twinkling like glitter. Original OGL fragment shader, hard-dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A living kaleidoscope mandala: a per-pixel polar mirror-fold gives exact N-fold dihedral symmetry over a domain-warped, slowly drifting jewel-tone field, so shards rotate and morph while luminous veins trace the facet seams and a soft bloom glows at the hub. Original OGL fragment shader with segments/speed/colors/intensity knobs, exponential-toned, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Gradient blinds: angled slats tilt open around the cursor to reveal a brighter rosewood-to-indigo field behind, each open slat catching a 1px lit edge, with a slow diagonal shimmer when idle. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A deep-space interstellar gas cloud: domain-warped fbm shader billowing luminous folds through a cool indigo-violet-into-teal gradient, with dark dust lanes, a twinkling starfield, and a soft depth glow. Original OGL fragment shader, hard-dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A classic 90s demoscene plasma background: layered sine/cosine fields over space and time sum into a scalar that indexes a smooth looping palette, so flowing color bands both deform and palette-cycle — organic, hypnotic, seamless. The pointer subtly warps the field. Tasteful cool duotone-to-tritone by default, full psychedelia via the colors knob. Original OGL fragment shader, tone-mapped, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A warp-tunnel light highway: cold-white light trails stream out of a central vanishing point and cool to steel-blue at the frame edges, one narrow cyan fast lane, the whole corridor bending through slow curves. Click and hold to accelerate — the FOV widens, streaks smear into long exposures, and release ghosts a dimmer copy one frame behind (shutter-drag) before snapping to cruise. Original OGL fragment shader, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Flowing lit fabric: broad domain-drifted folds carry fine silky striations while a satin specular band — an orbiting light caught by the cloth's gradient — sweeps across the drape. Moonlit pewter-blue, billows under the cursor. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A gravitationally-lensed black hole: a per-pixel Schwarzschild geodesic ray-march bends light around the event horizon, wrapping a white-hot accretion disk over and under the black sphere into the iconic lensed halo, with a crisp photon ring, Doppler-beamed asymmetry, and a lensed starfield. Original OGL fragment shader, filmic-toned, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Interactive fluid ink — a real GPU stable-fluids solver (semi-Lagrangian advection, vorticity confinement, Jacobi pressure projection) driving a persistent two-pigment dye field: cursor strokes push force and pigment into the fluid, so magenta and cyan inks swirl, fold through violet where they meet, and keep marbling long after the cursor stops. A seeded virtual cursor keeps it alive when idle and hands over to the real pointer with an exponential tween; two pigment blooms are pre-seeded so it is never blank on load. Half-res HalfFloat sim FBOs, adaptive Jacobi budget, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe (a frozen ink marbling).

Phosphor radar scope: a rotating sweep beam with a soft angular-gradient afterglow over concentric range rings and faint azimuth spokes; seeded contacts blip awake when the beam crosses them, bloom, then decay — drifters leave breadcrumb tracks. Optional hud knob for the full instrument look. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, DPR-clamped, reduced-motion-safe.

Pixel shatter bursts: an invisible mosaic of chunky cells where a click (or seeded auto-strike) detonates a radial shockwave — struck cells flash ultraviolet, physically eject along the radius with per-cell jitter in crisp integer-snapped steps, then cool and settle home; overlapping bursts interfere additively and hover leaves a faint warm-up trail. Canvas 2D, idle-silent between bursts, seeded, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

White light dispersing through an off-screen prism: a fan of rays spreads from a configurable origin, each frequency band refracting at its own angle so the spectrum separates red to violet — pinched to a white-hot throat at the prism and widening with distance. Rays flicker slowly like light through moving air, a slow hue-phase drift cycles which band leads, and the pointer tilts the dispersion axis with damped easing. True premultiplied-alpha transparency composites over any backdrop; an N-stop colors gradient overrides the spectral ramp. Original OGL fragment shader, jitter-dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

An ordered-dither shader field: a drifting noise field quantized through an 8x8 Bayer matrix into chunky retro dot patterning, in risograph sepia duotone with a slowly slipping print register. Original OGL fragment shader, offscreen-paused and reduced-motion-safe.

A converging thread field: silver filaments strung between two off-screen loom anchors — ends pinned, free middles bowing under noise like threads at uneven tension. Each thread is a 1/|d| neon glow with a white-hot core and long silver falloff, depth-faded into a dim far weave; the cursor parts the field with a Gaussian bend that eases in and cascades from near threads to far. Original OGL fragment shader, DPR-clamped with a 1920px render cap, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A vaporwave / retrowave sunset: a big banded retro sun (its lower half cut by thickening scanline gaps) sits on the horizon over a neon perspective grid receding across a dark reflective ocean, under a chrome gradient sky (magenta → indigo → cyan) with twinkling stars, a silhouetted mountain range, and the sun's wavering reflection on the water. Original OGL fragment shader with a passive grid scroll and breathing glow, screen-space-anti-aliased grid, exponential-toned, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

Sprung wave lattice: depth-graded rows of smooth lines ride an orbital noise field with woven coherence while a slow autonomous swell front rolls through every ~8s. Cursor swipes inject velocity impulses along the travel direction, proportional to cursor speed, then spring home on damped Hooke springs with a tanh soft-clip on stretch. Deep-sea steel default. Canvas 2D, seeded, offscreen-paused, DPR-clamped with device-pixel-aligned strokes, reduced-motion-safe (crest frozen mid-roll).

A volumetric cutting-torch beam: a single shaft of light stands anchored at a molten ground-contact bloom and fans upward into a soft amber column, with white-hot wisps rising inside it and volumetric fog falling through. The beam leans toward the pointer and the base carries a faint uneven-gas hum. An original OGL raymarched-quad fragment shader — DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, with a steady rest-tilt frame under reduced motion.

A perspective-tilted wireframe sheet running a real wave simulation: pointer movement lays a wake of circular ripples that propagate outward, visibly interfere where wakes cross, and reflect off the edges; clicks drop a heavier stone, and a soft seeded rain keeps the sheet alive when idle. Wave slope bends the graphite wires and wave height lights the crests emerald with a bright-core-plus-halo glow. CPU wave grid streamed to the GPU each frame, fixed-timestep and frame-rate independent, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused; reduced motion renders two frozen interfering ripples.

A dark veil: black-on-black volumetric drape of domain-warped ridged fbm where only the fold crests catch a whisper of light and a deep violet undertone breathes at a tenth of a hertz — luminance hard-capped so overlay text always wins. Original OGL fragment shader, time-dithered, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.

A jump-to-light-speed hyperspace background: layered star-streaks accelerate radially from a vanishing point, their length breathing with a slow warp surge, their heads fringed by real chromatic aberration and lit by a colored bloom, over a soft central glow and a faint twinkling starfield. The pointer steers the vanishing point. Original OGL fragment shader, tone-mapped, dithered, DPR-clamped, offscreen-paused, reduced-motion-safe.