the markers answer to stillness

How it's built

The scene is a first-person walk on a dusk beach. One height function drives both physics and rendering: the walker and the ground mesh sample the same math, so feet and sand never disagree. The colossus is a CC0 photogrammetry scan (Poly Haven, marble_bust_01), normalized by bounding box to monumental scale, tipped onto its cheek, and seated a third into the sand. It has pressed a shallow Gaussian bowl into the dunes around itself.

let h = WATER_Y + inland * 0.045; // the beach falls toward the water
h = Math.min(h, 2.1); // a dune crest caps the climb inland
h -= Math.exp(-(hx * hx + hz * hz) / 96) * 0.34; // the colossus's bowl

The sea is a standard material with a scrolling normal map baked from layered sine swell at boot. This sea is asleep. The wet-sand band is an onBeforeCompile patch that darkens and glosses the ground near the waterline. Collision is radial push-out against cylinder colliders. The frame renders in linear HDR with a half-res bloom, then one finishing pass adds grain, dither and a soft vignette. Audio is pure WebAudio: filtered-noise surf, a drone that gains near the head, a horn when every resonance stone is lit, and a warning sign that climbs out of the sand once they all are. The easter egg is at the waterline anyway: hold the sun's gaze, and the moon falls.

The lab as a place, not a page

The Walkthrough

WASD to walk · mouse or arrows to look · Shift to sprint.

or go back home