The settling
lattice
A live study in order and disturbance: a lattice of points at rest. Push it with the cursor and it swells; click and a ripple runs through — then it settles back into the grid.
Focus
A live study in order and disturbance — push the lattice and watch it return to order.
Medium
Three.js, GLSL
Duration
Ongoing
Last updated
June 2026
Move your cursor across the field above. A soft swell follows you, lifting the points beneath it. Click, and a ripple runs outward through the grid. Then — left alone — everything settles back into order.
That settling is the whole point.
Why this
one.
Most of the work I care about is about systems that absorb a disturbance and come back to coherence — a product, a team, a brief. You can push on a healthy one and it flexes, reorganises, and finds its level again. A brittle one keeps the dent.
This is the same idea with nothing else attached: a regular structure, a force, and a return. It is deliberately quiet. The interesting moment is not the splash — it is the few seconds afterwards, when the order reasserts itself.
How it
works.
A grid of points sits on a plane, seen at a slight tilt so it reads as space rather than wallpaper. The cursor projects onto that plane and raises a Gaussian "well" beneath it; a click emits an expanding ring whose amplitude decays over time. Height drives both size and a warm shift toward the accent, so a disturbance briefly glows and then cools as it flattens.
It is one buffer of points and a handful of lines of shader maths — cheap enough to run smoothly, restrained enough to leave on a page without it shouting.
Open
questions.
- Should a second cursor (or touch) interfere with the first, the way two real disturbances would?
- What does it feel like if the return is slightly imperfect — a faint memory of the dent left behind?
- Is there a version of this that belongs in a product, not just a study — a loading state, a sense of a system breathing?