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No.96 · Backgrounds

Glass Tiles

A wall of thick rounded glass tiles with light moving behind it; each bevel catches the passing beams as bright lines hugging the tile's edge.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Violet

Write a WebGL1 full-screen fragment shader background (one triangle, no libraries): a wall of thick, rounded-square glass tiles (8 across, about 4–5 on phones) with light moving behind it. Behind the glass: three slow beams — Gaussian lines (σ ≈ 2% of the height) whose height is a sum of two sines across x, drifting at different speeds — plus three soft pools wandering on slow Lissajous paths, and a small lamp that follows the pointer (eased, fading in and out on enter and leave). Each tile is a squircle, (|x|⁹ + |y|⁹)^(1/9) < 0.955 in tile space, leaving a thin dark grout; its normal is the squircle gradient, which has no creases on the diagonals; across the outer 55% of the tile (the bevel) the bend rises as edge^2.2. Through the face the light is sampled almost straight and dimmed (a frosted 22%); through the bevel it is sampled from well inside the tile, pulled against the normal, so when a beam passes behind a tile it appears as a bright line running along that tile's inner edge, curving round the corners, exactly as light does in thick glass. Add a faint fresnel at the very edge, a slight top-to-bottom gradient so each tile reads as a block, and push the brightest rim values toward white. Render at 0.85× resolution (0.6× and ~30fps on touch), pause offscreen and in hidden tabs, draw one still frame under reduced motion, and fall back to a CSS gradient and grid without WebGL. Children sit above the canvas. Selected variant — Violet: Palette { glow #c25cff, deep #3a1a8a, ground #07040e }: neon violet light in near-black violet glass, as in a night club wall.

Notes

Interaction
The pointer carries a small lamp behind the wall; its light catches in the bevels of the nearest tiles.
Motion
Beams and pools drift continuously on slow sines; the lamp follows with a 0.12 lerp and fades in and out at 0.06.
Accessibility
Decorative and aria-hidden. Reduced motion renders one still frame. Use a scrim for text; rim highlights can be bright.
Responsive
Tile count drops to about half on screens under 640px so tiles stay chunky; DPR capped at 2.
On touch
No lamp on touch; the beams keep moving.

Featured

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301 components