live simulation · ghosts.sim
seed 0xB80417E2
seed 0xB80417E2
crt pass · scanline 3px · vignette on
Ghost Cursor
2024Anomalyvibe 92%0xB80417E2
Every visitor leaves a ghost. Cursor coordinates are sampled at 30 Hz, simplified and stored; on the next visit every previous path replays at once, at the exact speed it was drawn. The page is haunted by everyone who came before you.
“record every visitor's cursor. replay all of them at once, forever, like ghosts in a house. i want to feel crowded on my own website.▮
TWEAKparameters — the stage obeys in real time
Gestation
6days
Prompts cast
96
Tokens burned
0.9M
replay lag
41ms
v0.1raw 30 Hz capture · 40 kB per session, unusable
v0.6RDP simplification at 2.5 px — the ghosts turn human
v1.0websocket replay-all · first true haunting
v2.014-day half-life — the piece now deletes people
v2.4current · 3 894 paths · the smear approaches
Substrate
CanvasWebSocketRedisRDP
Register
Uptime338 d
Paths stored3 894
Half-life14 d
Sample rate30 Hz
R&DResearch log
A colleague sent me a screen recording of her own cursor hunting for a button on a page I had built. I watched it eleven times. The hesitation was the entire design critique, and more useful than any interview I have run. I wanted a site where that hesitation was the content rather than the diagnostic.
Six days. The hard part was never the recording, it was the compression — an uncompressed session is about 40 kB and a thousand visitors makes the payload unusable. Ramer–Douglas–Peucker at a tolerance of 2.5 px cuts ninety per cent of it and, unexpectedly, makes the ghosts look more human. The simplification reads as intent.
Ghosts cluster, but not around what I designed as the focal point. They gather over a piece of dead text in the lower left, where people park the cursor while they read. Every heat map ever made would score that as engagement. It is the precise opposite: it is where attention is not.
It fills up. Past roughly four thousand stored paths the canvas is a solid smear and the haunting becomes wallpaper. A fourteen-day half-life keeps it legible, which means the piece quietly deletes people. Several visitors have written to ask whether their ghost is still there. Usually it is not.