Etheric Oasis

Etheric Oasis is a small interactive artwork for the web: a still pool, and two small worlds made for children. There is nothing to buy, no account to make, and nothing to subscribe to.

The pool

The page shows a still pool of water reflecting a night sky. Touching or clicking the water sends ripples across the surface, which spread, cross one another, and slowly settle. While the water is disturbed, nothing on the page can be read. When it goes still, a line of writing rises out of it, holds for a while, and fades. Disturb the water again and the line scatters.

That is the whole of it. The site gives nothing while a visitor is busy and opens when they stop, which is the opposite of how most screens behave.

The writing

The lines are drawn from writers long out of copyright, together with a few written for the piece. Among them:

• Be still, and know. — Psalm 46
• Muddy water clears if you let it sit still. — Laozi
• Nature does not hurry, and everything is accomplished. — Laozi
• We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. — Seneca
• No one is free who is not master of himself. — Epictetus
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. — Emerson
• A man is rich in proportion to the things he can let alone. — Thoreau
• The soul takes on the color of its thoughts. — Marcus Aurelius

Sand

A second page, sand, is a small world seen from above. Dragging a finger across the sea raises sand from the sea floor until it breaks the surface and becomes land. Held still, the finger keeps pouring, and the sand piles into hills and then mountains, with bare rock and snow on the heights. Trees grow to suit the height they stand at: palms on the shore, broad trees in the lowlands, pines up the slopes. Tapping the ground plants one; tapping the water makes rings; a switch in the corner turns the finger into a spade. Birds cross now and then, and sometimes a whale comes up for air. Turning the device turns the world with it, like a tray of sand held in both hands. It was made for a young child, so it needs no reading and nothing can go wrong.

Tracks

A third page, tracks, is a dark grid. Drawing on it lays a glowing road. Small coloured lights come out and drive whatever roads exist, running fast down the straights and slowing into the corners, picking their own way at every junction. Lamps grow slowly along the road and each one a light gathers sounds a note, so a bigger city plays fuller music. Every lamp counts toward the next building, which rises beside the road, so the counter is the city made visible. Red lights arrive once there is something worth troubling and break the road; touching one puts it out, and catching them one after another is worth more each time. A city that is looked after grows about twice as fast, and one that is left alone is damaged but never lost. The best score is remembered for next time.

How it is made

The water is a simulation of the wave equation running on a grid, drawn to a canvas element. The reflected sky is generated rather than photographed. The sand world runs a height field alongside the same wave simulation, and the tracks world is a grid with small travellers routing themselves across it. Each page is a single file well under a hundred kilobytes, with no frameworks, no libraries, and no outside services beyond a web font.

Privacy

The site collects no personal information. There are no analytics, no cookies, no tracking, no advertising, and no third-party scripts. Nothing a visitor does is sent anywhere; the only thing fetched from anyone else is the typeface, from Google Fonts. Two small numbers are kept in the visitor's own browser and never leave the device: how long they have spent with the water still, and their best score on tracks.