Halide Optics
A product launch built in the browser
Halide make a lens assembly with eleven elements. A video would have shown it once. We built the launch as a real-time scene so that the visitor can hold the assembly, take it apart, and decide for themselves how long to look at it.
- Real-time product launch site
- Instanced geometry, runtime environment, no HDR downloads
- Art direction, scene, web design, fallback system
- 11 weeks
Real-time, not pre-rendered
The whole product story runs in the browser at 60fps on a four-year-old laptop. Geometry is instanced, the environment is generated at runtime rather than downloaded, and the entire scene payload is smaller than a single frame of the video it replaced.
Because it is real-time, the assembly responds. Scroll drives the exploded view, the pointer drives the light, and the visitor controls the pace of the reveal.
An honest material
Optical glass is mostly what it reflects. Rather than faking that with a texture, we built a small procedural environment from the brand palette and let the material do the work. The result reads as glass because it behaves like glass, not because it looks like a photograph of glass.
Designed to degrade well
Every visitor without WebGL, on a low-power device, or with reduced motion enabled gets a designed alternative rather than a blank frame — a still composition, the same typography, the same information. The fallback was designed first and signed off before the scene was built.
“Our engineers use the site to explain the product internally. That was not the plan.”
Who made it.
3D direction · Real-time art direction · Web design · Motion
- Creative direction
- Halvane
- Real-time art direction
- Halvane 3D team
- Web design and build
- Halvane digital team
- Product photography reference
- Client-side
