Waterfall Of Light

The scene is drawn by a WebGL 2 fragment shader; the DOM only carries the card and its edge. The layers are computed in screen space and stack in the order light behaves in life: the thread of the stream at the top, the curtain of strands widening downward (the noise drifts down, so the flow looks accelerated), the haze around it, the impact at the edge, the long spread along it, god-rays from the point of impact and the reflection on the card. Colour is stacked in steps (depth, glow, core) and passes through Reinhard tone mapping — the glow keeps the structure of the strands instead of blowing out to white. The canvas sits above the card in screen mode: the light truly lands on the surface rather than lighting it from below. The cursor moves an extra light point inside the shader, so React re-renders nothing. Frames are computed only while the component is visible and the tab is active, devicePixelRatio is capped at two, and prefers-reduced-motion leaves a single still frame. Where WebGL 2 is missing, gradients of the same drawing hold the scene. The background under the stream is not empty: a grid with dots runs across it and an invisible field of technical glyphs lies on top — it appears only under the cursor beam, the donor's trick, where artwork opens only under a torch; the cursor coordinates go into CSS variables, so the reveal re-renders nothing. Smoke drifts through the dark part of the frame, and every few seconds a distant lightning briefly lights a cloud — the flash draws no bolt and does not argue with the waterfall. Card content is passed through children.