When I was working as a summer intern at SGI, I wrote a program to demo texture-mapping support.

Distort simulates looking at an image through a layer of water. When the user clicks on the screen, distortion ripples eminate from the contact point. The user can click around randomly on the screen, generating multiple ripple sources that interfere with each other.

Here's another way of looking at what's happening. This isn't what the user sees but it helps illustrate what's going on.

The program also has a second mode in which the image acts like a sheet of rubber. The user can grab the image and stretch it. It slowly snaps back when released.

The leaves in the picture were hand-chosen from the SGI parking lot. I sprayed water on the leaves and carefully arranged them on a scanner. I bumped up the saturation of the image just a tad.

I was aiming for a nice wet look that would go well with the watery ripple effect.

After I wrote Distort, someone at SGI rudely replaced my tasteful leaf picture with an ugly picture of their stupid dog. A dozen years later, SGI was delisted from the stock exchange and filed for bankruptcy.

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