Dry Caustic Room
A high-key white gallery room, seen into one corner. Rippling water light plays down both walls and across the glossy floor, with soft prismatic fringes, and there is no water anywhere. Touch the pointer to the unseen surface and slow rings spread; the caustics bend around them.
This is a viberdy Pro component
The live preview, the props panel and the write-up are open to everyone. The full source, the AI prompt and CLI install are part of Pro.
Medium: light
Light that remembers water.
Rooms where exactly one thing is wrong. This one has no water in it, and the light has not been told.
Props
"use client";
import { useEffect, useRef, useState } from "react";
import type { CSSProperties, ReactNode } from "react";
/**
* DryCausticRoom: a high-key white gallery room, seen into one corner. Water
* light plays down both walls and across the glossy floor, with soft prismatic
* fringes, and there is no water anywhere. The light falls through an opening
* in the ceiling; whatever water it crossed is somewhere above, out of sight.
*
* Move the pointer and you touch that unseen surface: slow rings spread from
* the point of the room you are pointing at, and the caustics bend around
* them. A click or tap drops a bigger ring. Left alone, a slow swell crosses
* the hidden water about every 11 s and the caustics drift on nine
* incommensurate waves, so the room never visibly loops.
*
* HOW IT IS MADE. One full-screen WebGL2 fragment pass, no dependencies.
// ---------------------------------------------------------------
// Full source available with a viberdy Pro subscription.
// https://viberdy.dev/pricing
// ---------------------------------------------------------------
}About this background
A white gallery room, seen into one corner: two walls, a glossy pale floor, and a square opening in the ceiling that holds a luminous recess. Water light runs down both walls in bright veins that sharpen as they fall, and lies across the floor as rings with soft magenta, cyan and amber fringes. There is no water in the room. The light has crossed some, above the opening, and that is all the room admits. It is drawn in one full-screen WebGL2 pass. Every surface point is traced back through the opening to a hidden water surface, a sum of nine incommensurate sines, and the caustic is the true focusing condition J = (1 + d hxx)(1 + d hyy) minus (d hxy) squared, taken at three depths for red, green and blue. Move the pointer and slow rings spread across that unseen surface from the spot you are pointing at, and the veins bend around them. A click or tap drops a larger ring. Left alone, a slow swell crosses about every eleven seconds and the room never visibly repeats. A calm zone flattens the caustics behind your copy, and a Pause control stops the loop.
Curator’s note
The anomaly is that the room is dry. Everything else is obedient: one motivated light, a real opening in the ceiling, caustics that come from a true focusing condition rather than a texture. The hidden water is only a height field (nine sines plus up to five ring sources) whose Hessian is summed analytically, so the pointer can disturb it and the light bends around the touch. Shimmer is slow flow, never flicker.
Pairs well with
Matched on shared tags and category — the entries most likely to be used alongside this one.
Levitating School Hero
heroesA school of butterfly koi hangs in the dry air of a concrete room, inside one shaft of light. The water they belong to is held in the ceiling. The light draws caustics on the floor, and every fish casts its shadow through the beam. Rest the pointer and they come to look; click and they scatter.
Shadow Shoal Footer
sectionsA footer that is a concrete floor lit edge to edge by water light from a ceiling you cannot see, with rounded top corners. Sharks pass through it, in every direction, and there are no sharks, only their shadows. They swim like real animals: they can only move along their heading. A resting pointer is noticed and avoided or inspected, a click makes them bolt away smoothly, and hovering a link slows the nearest one. Switch to butterfly koi if you prefer.
Bearing Flow Field
backgroundsAn ordered crystal of polished steel balls that pours and pools like water across a concrete floor, lit by one low raking lamp. The terraces and ragged edges of the pile are kept on purpose. Drag the pointer through it and it digs a trench that slumps back in; click and a handful of sixty drops.