Wavefield

Every pixel in this field sums the phase contribution of every wave source placed on it. The moiré structure you see is never drawn — it falls out of the arithmetic.

Wavefield is an interactive interference workbench: place point or plane wave sources, tune wavelength/amplitude/phase/falloff, and read the result through five different modes (smooth ramp, contour bands, fringes, node lines, sawtooth) across fifteen palettes.

No install, no account, no ads — a single page, runs straight in your browser tab.

What's inside

• 18 presets spanning unfiltered physics (Two Slit, Rosette, Quasicrystal, Phased Array...) through filtered composites (Mandala, Bloom, Silk) to finished palette/reading pairings (Aurora, Vortex, Lantern).
• Randomize picks from 9 structural archetypes — pair, rosette, vortex, lattice, quasicrystal, grating, scatter, tide, phased array — and varies within the relationship that makes each one legible, instead of producing generic noise.
• Variations — a 3×3 breeding grid. Click a child to make it the new parent and keep going; lock Sources, Reading, or Filters independently to steer what varies; walk back out of a dead end with undo.
• Motion — drift, spin, and a shared propagation speed so the pattern breathes rather than spins uniformly. Freeze any moment back into an editable still.
• Export — PNG up to high resolution, plus GIF (exactly lossless) and WebM recording of a live session.
• Up to 60 states of undo history across presets, randomization, and manual edits.

Good for

• Backgrounds, textures, and album/poster art
• A fidget toy for people who like optics and symmetry
• Teaching wave interference / moiré intuitively — drag two point sources together and watch the fringes reorganize live

Built with plain Canvas 2D and vanilla JS — no build step, no dependencies, works from a local file. Tested in current Chrome.