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Above the Clouds: A 3D Burj Khalifa Built on Gaussian Splats

Above the Clouds: A 3D Burj Khalifa Built on Gaussian Splats

A scroll-driven 3D concept site for the world's tallest tower, set during Dubai's rare fog season. The volumetric haze isn't faked; it's real Gaussian splat data running real-time in three.js, splats and polygons sharing one frame. Built solo in about six weeks.

Details

Published

What it is

Dubai gets fog maybe a dozen mornings a year, and when it does, the Burj Khalifa stops being a building and becomes an island. Adrian Red built a website around that exact moment. "Above the Clouds" is a 3D concept site for the world's tallest tower, and it opens the way the real thing does on those rare mornings: 828 meters of glass and steel pushing up through a flat white sea, the city erased somewhere below.

The scene runs real-time in the browser on three.js, but the soft, volumetric haze skips the usual billboard-and-noise trick. It leans on spark, the Gaussian splatting renderer. Adrian assembled it in ~6 weeks using Blender, Figma, Claude Code, and Antigravity, which is a faintly absurd timeline for something this composed, and a fair hint at where this kind of pipeline is drifting.

How it’s made

Technology
WebGL
Framework & Tool
Three.jsBlender
Interaction
Scroll Animation