Backgrounds

Northern-lights curtains with drifting vertical rays and a twinkling sky. The nearest curtain leans toward the pointer and glows brighter where you hover.

A Stripe-style liquid gradient: four colour centres orbit on Lissajous paths, blended in linear light through a two-stage domain warp. The pointer is a soft gravity well that drags the colours toward it.

Satin folds rendered as a lit height-field: normals from finite differences, diffuse + Blinn specular + anisotropic sheen. Your pointer is the light source.

Inigo-Quilez-style triple domain warp f(p + f(p + f(p))) coloured from four inks. The pointer stirs a vortex into the flow, faster when you move faster.

A lava lamp of implicit-surface blobs with fake-3D shading from the field gradient. One blob is glued to your pointer and merges with the others on contact.

Animated contour map with anti-aliased isolines (via fwidth) and bolder index contours. The pointer raises a hill; clicking drops a ring of terrain that spreads outward.

A rotated halftone screen whose dot sizes ride interfering waves. Hovering swells a lens of bigger dots; clicking sends a ring across the grid.

Stained-glass cells from an animated Voronoi diagram with bevelled shading and glowing leads. The cell under the pointer lights up and its neighbours’ edges glow.

Jump-to-lightspeed star streaks in three rotated layers. The vanishing point steers toward your pointer, and every click punches the throttle for a burst.

An outrun horizon: infinite perspective grid, striped sun, noise-carved mountains and twinkling sky. Move the pointer to pan and tilt the camera.

A black hole with gravitational lensing, a Doppler-beamed accretion disk, a photon ring and the far side of the disk bent over the shadow. It drifts toward your pointer and warps the starfield behind it.

Polished molten metal: a noise height-field reflecting a procedural studio environment with strip lights and Fresnel tint. The pointer drags a ripple; clicks drop a splash.

1-bit (or 3-tone) ordered dithering of drifting noise through a 2×2, 4×4 or 8×8 Bayer matrix at a chunky pixel size. The pointer is a soft spotlight.

Light dancing on a pool floor — two layers of animated Voronoi edges refracted by a noisy water surface, with drifting motes. The pointer is a sunbeam that focuses the network.

Volumetric god rays pouring from above, flickering through noise with dust caught in the beams. The source swings to aim at your pointer.

Real-time Navier–Stokes ink on the GPU: semi-Lagrangian advection, vorticity confinement, a 20-iteration Jacobi pressure solve and dye with fake lighting. Drag to stir, click to burst, or leave it to paint itself.

A height-field wave equation solved on the GPU, refracting a procedural tiled pool — or any image you pass. Move to leave a wake, click to drop a stone, and let the rain fall when idle.

The Gray–Scott model growing coral, mitosis, worms, mazes or spots in real time. Paint new life with your pointer; double-click to reseed. Every frame runs up to 24 simulation steps.

Drifting nodes linked by distance-faded lines, accelerated with a spatial hash. The pointer wires itself into the network and attracts (or repels) nearby stars; clicks blast them apart.

Thousands of particles riding the curl of a Perlin field — divergence-free, so streams never clump — leaving silky colour trails. The pointer is a vortex every stream bends around.

A matrix of spring-loaded dots that bulge away from (or toward) the pointer and wobble back into place. Clicking sends a shockwave rolling through the grid.

Digital rain in katakana, binary, hex, latin or block glyphs with mutating trails. Optional torch mode dims the rain except where your pointer shines.

Two octaves of noise rendered through a character ramp — terminal art that breathes. The pointer sends ripples through the field and brightens what it touches.

Craig Reynolds’ flocking — separation, alignment, cohesion — on a spatial hash. The flock scatters from your pointer (blushing as it flees) or follows it like a shadow.

A lattice of compass needles that swing to face the pointer (or orbit around it), growing and glowing as you get close. Idle, they track a wandering attractor.

A rubber-sheet grid: the pointer is a lens that bulges (or pinches) the mesh, stretched edges glow, and every vertex springs back with a wobble. Clicks punch it.

A grid that lights up cell by cell behind the pointer — strokes are rasterised so fast swipes leave no gaps — fading back with a shrink. Idle sparkles keep it alive.

The Linear/Vercel hero grid: a faint pattern with a pointer-following spotlight that reveals brighter lines and a colour wash. Driven by two CSS variables from a single rAF — zero re-renders.

Blurred gradient orbs drifting on transform-only keyframes with a film-grain overlay. The cheapest beautiful background there is — and it renders on the server.

A deterministic meteor shower over a faint star field — identical on server and client, animated purely with the `animate-meteor` keyframes from opus.css.

Eight SVG tile patterns — grid, dots, cross, diagonal, checker, plus, waves, isometric — with edge fades and optional pulsing highlight tiles. The workhorse behind most hero sections.

A CSS-3D perspective floor scrolling toward the viewer, with a horizon glow. The lightweight sibling of Synthwave Grid.

Glowing light pulses racing along the lines of a faded grid — the “background beams” look with deterministic placement and no JavaScript.

Concentric rings breathing in a staggered wave, fading downward — a calm focal backdrop for a logo, avatar or call-to-action.