AUREO

What it is

AUREO is a concept flagship. There is no client behind it and no real company called AUREO. I built it to answer a question I get asked a lot: can a website actually hold something big, or does anything impressive have to be a video?

It holds a city. Five districts, a river with bridges over it, roads with pavements and lane markings, a gold tower at the centre, and people standing outside the shops. You do not click through it. You scroll, and the camera flies.

What you see when you open it

You start high over a low-poly skyline at golden hour. Scroll and the camera drops along a fixed flight path, down between the towers, over the water and in toward the tower at the heart of the city. The copy arrives in beats as you travel: the city wakes, five districts and one skyline, and at its heart the gold tower, live above it all.

The sky moves with you. It goes gold, then dusk, then full night by the time you reach the end. That is one continuous journey, not four separate pages stitched together.

How it was built

Three.js and WebGL, rendered in real time on your own device roughly sixty times a second. Nothing is pre-recorded.

• The camera rides a fixed curve tied to your real scroll position, so scrolling is the flight control.
• The entire city is merged down to around two draw calls. That is the single biggest reason it stays smooth on a phone.
• The sky is a shader dome blending three 360 degree panoramas, mixed by scroll position, which is what moves the time of day.
• Cars, boats and people are instanced meshes with their own lanes and walking paths, so the streets read as lived in rather than staged.
• Image payload was cut from 4.4MB down to 346KB, which brings first paint to roughly one second.
• On mobile the heavier passes are stripped out automatically and the crowd counts drop, so the frame rate holds.

What it demonstrates

Three things worth paying for. That heavy 3D can still be fast, phones included. That scroll can carry a story instead of just moving text up the screen. And that the detail gets finished, the bridges, the lane lines, the shop signs, the people standing outside them. Detail is where this kind of build either earns trust or falls apart.