AURA

What it is

AURA is the smallest of my flagships and the most direct. No client, no product, nothing to sell inside it. It exists to answer one question people ask the moment they see a site that moves: is that just a video?

It is not. Every ribbon and every speck of light is being worked out by your own device as you look at it. Nothing is recorded, so nothing loops in a way you can spot, and the download weight is a fraction of what footage would cost.

Where it came from

AURA started life as a background. I was building the gold backdrop for my own homepage and the flowing ribbons kept fighting the particle hero sitting in front of them, gold on gold, both moving. The honest fix was not to water the ribbons down. It was to take them out and give them a page of their own.

That is AURA. A piece of a build that was too good to throw away.

What you see when you open it

A dark field with ribbons of gold flowing through it, bokeh layered at three different depths so the space has real distance to it, a soft bloom on the brightest points and a light film grain over the whole frame. Move the mouse or tilt a phone and the camera drifts to follow. It is quiet, and it does not stop.

How it was built

• Three.js and WebGL, particles only. No video file and no image sequence anywhere in it.
• Three separate depth layers, fine, medium and large, so the field reads as depth rather than flat sparkle.
• Bloom and grain passes on top, both deliberately restrained. Push bloom too hard on a bright gold source and the whole frame turns into one yellow blob, which is exactly what happened on the first pass.
• Pixel ratio capped and particle counts lowered on smaller screens, so a phone holds the same frame rate as a laptop.

What it demonstrates

That real-time motion is usually cheaper than the video everyone reaches for. A looping hero video is often several megabytes that arrive blurry and sharpen up late. This is a small amount of code that never repeats and never buffers.

For a brand that wants a homepage with life in it and a fast load, that trade is the entire argument.