Think about the last time you were at a lake, river, or the ocean. Remember the ripples of the water, the waves crashing against the rocks, the wake following a boat, the sun reflecting off the crests? Amazingly, the mathematical equations describing many of these phenomena have been known for over a hundred years. The trouble is, actually solving them is extremely difficult and costly, making accurate, realistic simulations a significant problem for computer scientists, visual artists, and others. Now, computer scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) and Nvidia have introduced a novel representation of waves that improves computational efficiency by at least an order of magnitude. Based on principles of theoretical physics, their method allows for significantly more visual detail as well as a greater degree of user control.