[LAB] 2025 Holiday Snow Globe

I wanted to make something small and personal, but also give myself an excuse to push a few ideas I’ve been circling for a while.

The first thread was light. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lighting across curved, reflective surfaces on the Forged site and in the Aura Color Explorer, and a snow globe is basically a perfect stress test for that. Glass, refraction, subtle distortion, highlights bending as the camera moves. If the light feels off, the whole thing collapses. So that became the foundation.

The snow was the hardest part. In WebGL, snow like this is faked. You distort a flat layer with noise. It’s fine, but it feels a little hollow. With WebGPU, I wanted the snow to actually exist inside the globe. Using compute shaders, the mesh fills the full volume and generates normals so the lighting responds correctly as everything moves.

Continuing a personal thread, I brought in the Porsche 911 GT3 and let it drift inside the globe. It’s a little absurd on purpose. A precision machine sliding around a tiny winter world. But that contrast adds motion, scale, and a bit of magic. It turns the globe into something playful instead of static.

I wanted a light narrative intro, so I leaned on AI video but treated it as a raw ingredient. I built a chroma-key pipeline so AI videos can output a blue or green screen and be keyed out in real time. That makes it easy to blend AI footage directly into interactive content instead of hard cuts. It’s scrappy, but flexible, and it opens up a lot of room to move fast.

In the end, it’s just a Christmas card. But it’s also a place where lighting experiments, volumetric snow, interaction, and AI workflows all collide in a low-pressure way. Sometimes the best experiments come from giving yourself permission to make something small and weird like drifting inside a snow globe.