Burn
A print burns through to the picture from the pointer, through its shadows first.
Burn runs on its own frame clock, so the bench’s clock and motion switch don’t reach it. Under your system’s reduced motion it cuts.
Anatomy
| Mask | one canvas over the crisp poster for the plate’s whole life; every dot is print or crisp |
|---|---|
| Landing | each dot has a landing time; for 70ms before it lands it prints as Bayer grain turning to ink, so every front arrives as grain |
| Fronts | first-passage times on an 8-connected grid (Dial’s bucket queue, hence square fronts); crossing costs more in highlight than in shadow, so fronts run through the dark masses first |
| From the pointer | solved on 4×4-dot cells from the cell under the pointer and up to three dark cells near it, scaled to 520ms, plus T · 28ms of grain; keyboard focus opens from the centre |
| Back | from scattered seeds biased to the shadows, scaled to 640ms |
| Cost | fronts solved once per plate, ~40–50ms when the main thread is idle; a hover ~1.5ms to retime |
From src/lib/exposure/burn.ts and the guide’s Motion §1.
Decisions
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No arrival
Images do not transition in (Oct 2026): the page transition is the arrival, so a picture playing its own on top of it was a second one.
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Retimed, never restarted
A new target retimes only the dots that have not landed, so leaving mid-reveal never makes the picture jump.
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Replaced Bloom
A spring-driven square reveal round the cursor (Sept 2026). The burn was chosen because it reads as the hero culture’s arrival, carried onto the pictures.
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Touch
Nothing hovers and a tap is the link, so on touch nothing burns: plates rest on the print.