Sphere mask
Reconstruct the front hemisphere and the refracted back-wall hit from the fragment coordinate. The same rotating sphere supplies both layers of the glass.
THE LITTLE LAB
Dual layers make the illusion.
The hero pass reconstructs a glass sphere from screen coordinates, samples a rotating galaxy on the front and refracted back walls, then re-evaluates the rim per RGB channel.
Star field
A tilted galaxy band, nebula pockets, dust lanes, three star scales, and a pulsar are generated from stable hashes, so every orb gets its own sky without a texture.
Liquid shell
The lens falloff grows toward grazing angles, then separate R/G/B samples create the chromatic edge while Fresnel lighting and specular lobes sell the liquid glass.
hero.frag.glsl
GLSL ES 1.00
float k = uLens * fall * swell;
float cR = 1.4 * (1.0 + 0.06 * sin(uTime * 1.3 + uPhase));
float cG = 1.2 * (1.0 + 0.06 * sin(uTime * 1.3 + uPhase + 2.1));
vec3 col = vec3(shade(p * (1.0 - k * cR)).r,
shade(p * (1.0 - k * cG)).g,
shade(p * (1.0 - k)).b);ABOUT THIS BUILD
A tidy, inspectable starting point for shader experiments.
This is a clean-room recreation of the observable visual idea: circular canvases, a glass rim, colored nebulae, sparse stars, and a five-position carousel. The GLSL, layout, and controls in this folder are original and intentionally dependency-free.