Warped Stripes

Twenty-one horizontal bars, thin and tightly packed at the top, thicker and further apart toward the bottom. At rest nothing moves. The pattern only reacts when you do.

Move the cursor across it and every movement drops a ripple into the field. Each ripple pushes the nearby bands apart and then decays. Where a band is bent steepest it gets squeezed thinner, which is the pinch you see in op-art prints. The bands don't follow the cursor directly. They follow a smoothed copy of the displacement that lags a little behind, so the motion trails like something moving through liquid instead of snapping to the pointer.

Stop moving and the ripples fade out until the pattern is perfectly still again. The disturbance is temporary, and the order comes back on its own.

The gradation does more work than it looks like. Spacing the bars evenly reads as a flat texture. Skewing their positions toward the top makes the whole thing feel bottom-heavy, like it has weight, and that's what makes the distortion read as distortion.

On a phone, a tap drops a single ripple where your finger lands, and a held finger drags like the mouse.