The new Experiment page is the most technical thing on this site so far: a hand-written WebGL shader, canvas particle systems, 3D pointer-tracked cards, scroll-driven type, and a glass panel with a live specular highlight — all real, running code, not screenshots or video loops.
Prototyping out loud
Rather than guessing which techniques were worth building, I first put together a standalone preview with six candidates side by side, each one genuinely interactive, so I could play with all of them before committing to any. That preview is what I actually picked from — the real page is the shortlist, not a first draft.
What made the cut
- An animated gradient-mesh shader, now the page's own hero background
- A particle field that scatters from the cursor like a soft force field
- Cards that tilt in 3D toward the cursor, with a light sheen that follows along
- Headlines that resolve into focus as they scroll into view, plus a text-scramble effect
- An ambient, generative flow field — no two frames alike
- A frosted glass panel with a highlight that tracks the cursor like real light on glass
The detail I like most
None of these are hardcoded to one color palette. They read their accent colors from the same CSS variables the AI Journey page's theme picker sets — including the custom RGB mix, if you've dialed one in there. Pick a theme on one page, and the shader on this one shows up in those exact colors. Small detail, but it's the kind of thing that makes a site feel like one system instead of a pile of separate pages.
Bugs worth mentioning
Two real ones came out of this, both cross-browser: a Safari-only repaint issue that had already come up once before on this site, and a CSS stacking bug where the mobile menu was quietly rendering behind the page content on narrower windows — not obvious until someone actually tried it on a real device. Both are exactly the kind of thing that's easy to miss testing on one browser at one width, and a good reminder to check more than one.
Go try it yourself, or get in touch if you want something like it built for a real project.