The Lattice

Inspired by Crystallographic disorder on Wikipedia

Built with Canvas 2D · Hexagonal lattice · Verlet-style physics

Techniques Cursor excitation system · Neighbor contagion · Phase-transition cascade · Bond opacity tiers

The idea

A perfect hexagonal crystal fills the screen. Your cursor carries thermal energy. Wherever you move, atoms vibrate and displace from their equilibrium positions. The disorder is permanent — the lattice remembers every disturbance.

Two-layer interaction model

The cursor affects atoms through two mechanisms operating at different timescales:

1. Excitation — immediate. Atoms near the cursor vibrate visibly right now, even on a brief pass. This decays rapidly (~96% per second) once the cursor moves away. It’s the “you can feel the heat” moment.

2. Permanent disorder — slow accumulation. Each frame the cursor is nearby, atoms gain a small permanent displacement. This never decays. It’s the actual structural damage.

The visual uses max(disorder, excitation) so you always see a response, but only sustained interaction creates lasting change.

Contagion

Disorder spreads between neighbors at a rate proportional to the square of the source atom’s disorder. This creates a critical mass effect: isolated defects barely spread, but once a cluster forms, it cascades. The quadratic rate means the transition from “a few displaced atoms” to “the whole region is amorphous” happens suddenly — exactly like a real phase transition.

Phase progression

The experience tracks average disorder across all atoms and announces transitions: point defects, clustering, amorphous, phase transition. At extreme disorder, atoms drift entirely free of their lattice sites and eventually fade — the structure dissolves into nothing.

A very slow global temperature rise ensures the experience eventually completes even without interaction, but active cursor movement accelerates everything dramatically.