Plasma effect

It uses cycles of changing colours warped in various ways to give an illusion of liquid, organic movement.

In some implementations, color palettes are used to shift the hue of the entire effect, creating a flowing and vibrant motion.

This effect can be achieved programmatically by generating pixel values based on mathematical formulas.

It is a popular technique in shaders and graphical effects to create visually appealing animations.

[1]Plasma is the name of a VGA graphics demo created by Bret Mulvey in 1988 and released on CompuServe.

It uses a diamond-square algorithm to generate a 2D pattern, and then cycles the colors using hardware palette in its 256-color mode.

Plasma can also be implemented easily in software rendering by using sinus tables and pseudocolor palettes, and it has also been the first true demo effect for many beginning PC democoders.

In order to achieve a sufficiently fast and good-looking real-time implementation (especially on the limited hardware available at the time this effect was at the height of its popularity in the 1990s), one would often do "non-correct" approximations to this algorithm.