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Lone Medusa Section

One large jellyfish, centred low in a black void, lit only from inside. The bell is dark transparent glass with gonads, canals and frilled oral arms burning through it. Touch a tentacle and light runs up it to the bell; click and it jets upward and sinks back.

ProAttentionminimal

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.

Preview
AeriumMedusa Hall
Specimen 04
Medium: air

One animal. No water.

It is lit from the inside and it notices when you touch its arms. Rooms where exactly one thing is wrong.

Props

1
10
10
Leans toward a resting pointer
Pause control
Show sample copy
No runtime dependencies
"use client";

import { useEffect, useRef, useState } from "react";
import type { CSSProperties, ReactNode } from "react";

/**
 * LoneMedusaSection: one large jellyfish, centred low in a black void, with the
 * only light in the room coming from inside it. The bell is dark transparent
 * glass: you see the four gonad rings, the radial canals and the frilled oral
 * arms burn through the tissue, and a thin line of light along the rim. Long
 * tentacles hang from the margin and trail with real follow-through.
 *
 * HOW IT IS MADE. Hand-written WebGL2, no dependencies, one pass list a frame:
 *   1. marine snow (points), lit only by the animal and only where it is near;
 *   2. the bell, a lathe-built shell (outer and inner surface) deformed in the
 *      vertex shader by one axisymmetric pulse map (the margin sweeps in and a
 *      little down, the lappets sag and flutter). Alpha-blended, NOT additive:
 *      back faces first, then the organs and tentacles that live inside and

  // ---------------------------------------------------------------
  // Full source available with a viberdy Pro subscription.
  // https://viberdy.dev/pricing
  // ---------------------------------------------------------------
}
Notes

About this section

Most dark hero scenes are glowing screensavers. This one is a specimen. A lathe-built bell, a thin shell of nearly clear glass that thickens into a milky, scalloped margin, hangs low in a black void. Four soft gonad horseshoes, eight radial canals and a ring canal show through the tissue, and the only light in the room is theirs, with a cool, subtle fresnel rim on the edge. Every ten seconds the bell makes a quick power stroke: the margin snaps inward, the bell narrows and deepens, the animal rises a little and sinks back, and ten long tentacles and four frilled oral arms lag behind it with visible follow-through. Rest the pointer and the bell leans toward it. Drag through the water and the tentacles are pushed by a current; touch a strand and a pulse of light runs up it to the bell. Click for a harder stroke. A built-in Pause control stops the loop.

Curator’s note

The anomaly is the absence of water: a single moon jelly in a black room, lit only by its own organs. It works because the bell is photographic glass, nearly clear at the crown and milky at the margin, with soft gonad volumes instead of glowing outlines, and because the tentacles are simulated on a fixed 1/120 s step, so they trail with real follow-through and never jitter. Palette and size change the specimen without touching the physics.

Related

Pairs well with

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A bloom of tiny moon jellyfish in a near-black void, with no water in the picture: 600 by default, up to 2000 on the count prop, each one small and far like a bloom seen from a distance. The glass is colourless; the only colour is in the organs glowing inside. The swarm has read your page: it drifts around the content, keeps clear of it, and softly lights the words nearest to it. Move the pointer and a current runs through the bloom; click and a ring of it crosses the swarm.

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