There’s a long-standing tradition of people creating realtime graphics software on personal computers that doesn’t offer any interactivity. They are indeed called demos and the community is called the demoscene. It goes back to the late 1980s and had a golden era in the mid-90s on Amiga and PC. (Pre-Internet, watching and making demos was one of the few socially and creatively oriented things you could do for free on a home computer.)
To be pedantic, this isn’t a full-blown demo. Small demos are called intros, and a category of them is the size-constrained intro (e.g. 1kB or 4kB). So this could be either a small intro or an effect as part of a bigger demo.
It’s worth looking up some of the small intros. People can squeeze entire GPU-raytraced universes with music into a few kilobytes.
IMO the author could very much submit this to a demoparty in the "demo" category (assuming they'd substitute the music with a fitting original work).
These days, the only notable difference between demos and intros is file size. If it's bigger than 64kb, it's a demo. You can totally have a short, single-effect demo like this one, and there's plenty such demos out there.
Ergo, I disagree, I think this counts as "full-blown" for any reasonable current definition.
Fair enough. The definition of a demo in the '90s was definitely multi-part: multiple effects with usually still graphics in between (such as group logos or pixel art rip-offs from fantasy paintings). A single-effect demo that wasn't an intro would have been rare.
Man...I need to get into the Demo scene. I have been disillusioned with the tech world because of just how utilitarian everything feels. I have been looking for something like this forever
There’s a long-standing tradition of people creating realtime graphics software on personal computers that doesn’t offer any interactivity. They are indeed called demos and the community is called the demoscene. It goes back to the late 1980s and had a golden era in the mid-90s on Amiga and PC. (Pre-Internet, watching and making demos was one of the few socially and creatively oriented things you could do for free on a home computer.)
To be pedantic, this isn’t a full-blown demo. Small demos are called intros, and a category of them is the size-constrained intro (e.g. 1kB or 4kB). So this could be either a small intro or an effect as part of a bigger demo.
It’s worth looking up some of the small intros. People can squeeze entire GPU-raytraced universes with music into a few kilobytes.