LYRA
The constellation is drawn with WebGL, which this browser has turned off. The word above still follows your typing — set in the same face the particles sample.
One word, fifty thousand stars
Nothing here is a font file or a video. Whatever you type is set once on a hidden canvas, read back as pixels, and thrown to a particle cloud that lives entirely on the graphics card. The counter in the corner reports the true number — fifty thousand points on a desktop screen, fewer on a phone.
The sampling
The word is painted big and heavy on an offscreen canvas, and every opaque pixel becomes a candidate address. Each particle is thrown at a random inked pixel, with a little jitter and a little depth, so the word has thickness.
The physics
Spill, magnet and reform are closed-form motion — ballistics, damped bounces and staggered springs — evaluated per particle in the vertex shader. JavaScript ships a handful of scalars per frame; it never touches a particle.
The constellation
A few hundred particles are promoted to stars. Each is wired to its two nearest neighbours, the rest of the cloud dims to dust, and the word becomes a sky chart of itself — redrawn for every word you try.