Seen through reeded glass.

THE SYSTEM BEHIND THE SURFACE

Inside Reeded Waveform.

Behind the glass, a single great arc of blue-grey rises from the lower left, lit in peach along its edge over a dark ground, with a warm glow low in the middle. In front of it stands a pane of narrow vertical reeds. Each reed is a small curved lens: it squeezes and mirrors its slice of the scene and, because it is slightly tilted, lifts that slice by an amount that grows across it. A sloping edge behind the glass therefore climbs inside every reed and drops back at the next, and the smooth arc becomes a row of sharp teeth. Light spreads down each reed, so the scene is soft vertically and crisp across; every reed is shaded like a cylinder and catches a thin highlight. The forms breathe slowly, so the teeth rise and fall on their own, and the cursor moves the scene behind the glass. An image or a video can stand behind the reeds instead: then each reed bends it as a lens with no seam between them, so it reads as a clean picture behind fluted glass.

Reeded Waveform refracts its own scene or a chosen image or video; it does not refract your page's HTML, and its reeds are an optical model, not a ray-traced pane of glass. Its teeth are not an audio waveform or data.

1.966 ms GPU timestamp median; p95 2.032 ms. 1440x900 @ dpr 1.5; Apple M2 (8-core GPU), Metal driver on macOS Version 26.6.2 (Build 25G83); measured 2026-10-12. This is a recorded headless sample, not a browser FPS or mobile-performance guarantee.