Dither playground guide

Start

The tool opens with its sample, the AIKIZI logo with red letters and a blue shadow, read at 192 × 192 pixels. That makes about 3,000 dots. Try the sample brings it back after you load your own picture.

What you need

• A current browser. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all draw it.
• A picture, if you want your own. Any picture the browser can open works. Pictures wider than 800 pixels are shrunk to that width first.
• A microphone or a music file, only if you want sound to move the dots.

Your first result

1. Open Dither playground.
2. Press Image A to open a picture, or drop one on the frame. Or keep the sample the page opens with; Try the sample brings it back later.
3. With a mouse, move over the dots to push them; no click is needed. With a finger, keep it down and slide it over the dots.
4. Under Animation, pick Curl drift, Three streams, Lorenz attractor or Golden spiral and watch the dots leave and come home. Still brings back pushing.
5. Open Load and export and press Save PNG to keep the frame as dither-frame.png.

Good to know

• For a brighter picture, press Advanced under Level of detail, raise Dot min and Dot max, and set Opacity to 1.
• The sliders under Sampling apply as you move them. Grid step and Brightness make the dots again, so the dots snap back to the picture; Dot min and Dot max only resize them.
• The line under the image buttons shows how many dots there are, the frames drawn per second, and the size the picture was read at.
• Save PNG saves the frame as you see it, background included, at the size of the frame times your screen's pixel ratio (at most 3, or 2 on phones). It is a standard range (SDR) picture; nothing here is HDR.
• Copy, next to it, puts the same picture on the clipboard, where the browser allows it.
• Your pictures are kept on this device, and every lab tool that takes a picture opens with them, until you press × on a tile. Image A becomes the dots; Image B is the second image they morph into.
• On a phone the controls sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen. Tap the bar to open them.