What is liquid_prnc_glass?

Liquid Prnc Glass is a browser-based laboratory for producing and tuning a specific visual effect: optical glass refraction applied to the edges of a video or image. The effect makes it look as though the content is being viewed through a piece of curved glass, with light bending and colors separating around the borders. The README is explicit that this is not a CSS blur or filter trick, the effect comes from custom GPU shader code that actually simulates how light refracts. The project is built with React and TypeScript and runs in the browser using WebGL, which is a browser standard for running graphics programs on the GPU. The shader is written in GLSL, which is the language used to write programs that run directly on graphics hardware. Three.js, a popular JavaScript library for 3D graphics, handles the rendering pipeline. A video or image is uploaded as a texture to the GPU, and the GLSL code bends the pixels around the edges according to the settings you choose. The lab interface exposes a detailed set of controls for tuning the appearance. These include parameters for refraction strength, edge width, corner roundness, color dispersion (the separation of red, green, and blue channels, which mimics how real glass splits light), edge darkening, and highlights. There are also flow controls that add animated movement to the effect over time. Once you have the settings tuned the way you want, the lab offers two export options. You can record the live canvas directly as it plays, or use a more precise rendering path that builds the video frame by frame using browser video encoding tools for a deterministic result. There is also a feature that generates a Markdown document summarizing the settings and how to copy the effect component into another project. To run it locally, you install dependencies with npm and start the development server. A live version is available online at liquid-prince.online.