What is Shockwave effect?
Also called: Ripple effect, Distortion wave
The short answer
A shockwave effect is a ring of distortion that bursts outward from a point, bending the image behind it like a blast or a stone dropped in water.
Shockwave effect, explained
It is usually a shader that displaces pixels along an expanding ring, often with colour fringing at the wavefront. Pairing it with a physical kick to the page's elements makes the blast feel like it hits the content.
It works as punctuation for a moment, like a completed build, a purchase or a level-up, not as constant decoration.
Questions people ask about Shockwave effect
What is Shockwave effect?
A shockwave effect is a ring of distortion that bursts outward from a point, bending the image behind it like a blast or a stone dropped in water.
Related terms
A shader is a small program that runs on the GPU for every pixel or vertex, calculating colour and shape; shaders create effects like liquid metal, glow, ripples and gradients.
Micro-interactionsMicro-interactions are small, single-purpose animations that respond to what a visitor does, like a button that presses in, a heart that fills or a field that shakes on an error.
WebGLWebGL is the browser technology that draws hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics inside a web page using the device's GPU, with no plugin.
Parallax scrollingParallax scrolling moves background and foreground layers at different speeds as you scroll, creating an illusion of depth.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.