Kage
Immersive WebGL night walk through a Kyoto mountain temple
Overview
The work behind the result.
Kage — "Where stillness reveals the unseen" — is a demo we built to show what a website can feel like when it stops being a brochure. It's a five-chapter night walk through a Kyoto mountain temple: charred cypress, lantern light, and a vermilion moon, all rendered live in WebGL. No client, no brief — just proof of the ceiling.
The Challenge
What needed to change
Portfolio pieces usually show what a client paid for, not what a studio is capable of. We wanted a piece that answers the question every ambitious brand asks — "can a website actually feel like an experience?" — with something you can scroll through instead of taking our word for it.
Our Solution
Built around the business
We wrote, designed, and built the whole experience from scratch: a real-time 3D temple scene modeled in code with Three.js, scroll-driven chapters covering gates, gardens, craft, and night rituals, and illustrated field notes on concepts like shakkei (borrowed scenery) and yakisugi (charred cypress). No templates, no page builder — a single hand-tuned page where design, story, and engineering are the same thing.
How we built it
- 01
Wrote the five-chapter narrative around Kyoto temple architecture and ritual
- 02
Modeled the temple, gardens, and lanterns procedurally in Three.js
- 03
Built scroll-driven chapter navigation with a custom motion system
- 04
Designed the ink, bone, and vermilion visual language with Japanese typography
- 05
Shipped it as a single fast, dependency-light page on Vercel
Results
The numbers speak
Chapters in the guided night walk
Temple scene rendered live in WebGL
Templates or page builders used
Explore it yourself — it's a demo