Each of the glowing markers is a point source radiating a spherical wave that fills the volume around it, exactly like a ripple spreading from a stone dropped in water but in three dimensions. At any point p in space, the field contributed by source i at distance d is a damped travelling wave; the total field at p is the real sum (superposition) of every source's contribution, which is what makes the bright and dark regions you see — constructive interference where waves arrive in phase, destructive interference where they cancel.
E(p,t) = Σᵢ A·sin(k·dᵢ − ω·t + φᵢ) / dᵢⁿ
ω = 2π·f, k = ω / v, dᵢ = |p − sourceᵢ|
The exponent n (spatial attenuation) sets how fast each source's contribution falls off with distance — low values let waves reach far across the volume and interfere broadly, high values keep each source's influence local. Every one of the few thousand particles in the cloud independently evaluates this sum every frame, and its color is a soft-clipped map of the resulting local field strength — this is a genuine numerical superposition, not a pre-baked animation.
- Energy sources — how many radiating points fill the volume; more sources means denser interference patterns.
- Field frequency — angular frequency ω of every source; higher frequency packs more wavefronts into the same space.
- Field amplitude — the source strength A, scaling how far the field pushes into "bright" territory before soft-clipping.
- Spatial attenuation — the falloff exponent n; realistic free-space spherical spreading is close to n≈1.