Ripple Distortion
A procedural surface of dots, grid, or lines that ripples like water. The cursor drags a gentle wake, clicks drop concentric ripples that expand and decay, and overlapping wavefronts displace and brighten the pattern as they pass.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Ripple Distortion".
Description: A procedural surface of dots, grid, or lines that ripples like water. The cursor drags a gentle wake, clicks drop concentric ripples that expand and decay, and overlapping wavefronts displace and brighten the pattern as they pass.
Current settings: pattern = Dots, density = 30, strength = 16, wave speed = 1, decay = 2, color = Dual, hue = 200, second hue = 320.
Tags: Canvas 2D, pointer-reactive, click, distortion, water.
Requirements:
- Use requestAnimationFrame with a delta-time (dt) step, clamped to avoid jumps on tab switches.
- Render crisply: fully clear the canvas every frame (clearRect). Do NOT fake motion blur by painting a translucent background each frame, because that causes permanent 8-bit "ghost" burn-in. If you want trails, store each particle's recent positions and draw them as an explicit fading tail.
- If many short-lived particles are spawned, use an object pool (pre-allocate, reuse, swap-remove on death) to avoid GC pauses.
- Scale the backing store by devicePixelRatio (cap ~2) and handle resize.
- Pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas is off-screen; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Expose the listed settings as adjustable props/controls.