The sandbox of the MiRiS circle — where wild ideas grow soft edges, where prototypes morph in public, where the future remembers it was once optimistic.
soft machine
A research thread on interfaces that breathe. Buttons that inhale. Containers that morph. We treat the screen like clay, not concrete — every element has a slow pulse, a body, a mood.
orbital cursors
Pointers that drag a comet trail. Click anywhere and watch the page register your gravitational pull. Tiny moons follow your hand across the canvas.
chrome dreams
Shimmers, iridescence, lens flares without the lens. We borrow from the Y2K dream of polished surfaces and run them through CSS gradients until the screen becomes liquid mirror.
a soft compiler
What if the build step was a friend? A prototype that turns lint warnings into kind suggestions and renders error stacks as ribbons. It still complains. It just complains gently.
page weather
Every section reports its own atmosphere. Scroll past a heavy paragraph and the cursor feels heavier. Land on a quiet block and the page exhales. A toy, but a sincere one.
cluster radio
A peer-to-peer radio that only broadcasts within line of sight of a wifi router. Ephemeral signals, very small audiences, mostly mood music for buildings.
live signals
a cluster of small experiments running right now — click to ping
drag the blob
A small CSS playground. Move your cursor and the blob below answers. The morph speed, gradient angle, and shimmer offset all hinge on where you point. Lift the cursor to let it settle.
field log
notes from the workbench, in no particular order
- 04.04 // 22:05 replaced every rectangle on the homepage with a slow-morphing blob. nothing broke. some things sang.
- 04.02 // 11:18 discovered that border-radius with eight values is a love letter from a 1999 web designer to a 2026 one. it still works.
- 03.30 // 03:41 argued for an hour about whether chrome counts as nostalgia. concluded: only when it is grateful.
- 03.27 // 19:02 first orbit-nav prototype shipped. six small planets around a still center. it spins whether you watch it or not.
- 03.21 // 14:55 noticed every grid we removed made the page feel kinder. that was the whole memo.
the circle
MiRiS is a small circle of researchers, designers, and amateur astronomers. We share a workshop, a server, and a slow conviction that the web can still be a soft place.
miris.xyz is our unfenced backyard. Things break here. Things bloom here. If you found this page, you are already invited.