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Inside Alquimia's Virtual Apothecary

Inside Alquimia's Virtual Apothecary

A glowing ancestral artifact floats in a dim room, and you unlock it one waypoint at a time. Five WebGL canvases, a chord that assembles note by note, and a clever trick: the main scene drops its pixel ratio and post-FX the second a sub-view steals focus.

Details

Published

What it is

Yeberson Orta Tovar built a portal for Hotel Herrera's apothecary as an "Ancient Ancestral Artifact." Touch the right geometric shape and a secondary canvas blooms into focus. There are four of them, each waiting behind the artifact's facets. Every waypoint also rings out a single note from a C Major 13th Augmented chord, which sounds exactly as cosmic as it reads, and reaching the end stacks all of it at once: C, E, G, B, D, E, G.

The clever part is what happens when those secondary canvases steal the spotlight. Running five WebGL contexts at once is a quick way to set a laptop fan screaming, so Yeberson engineered the main background canvas to dynamically drop its Device Pixel Ratio the moment a sub-view takes over, then unmounts the main scene's post-processing entirely while you're looking elsewhere. You stop paying for pixels and effects nobody's watching. Go poke at it: move through the waypoints to hear the chord assemble itself, then crack open the dev tools and watch the DPR and post-FX flip on and off as you move between views.

How it’s made

Technology
WebGL
Framework & Tool
Three.js
Interaction
Audio