MB · The Lab

EXP. 011 · Depth, instead of height

The Lab — EXP. 011 · after WLT.DESIGN

The thread, from inside.

One vermillion line runs through morganbrown.co, drawn beside the text. This machine turns it ninety degrees: depth instead of height. Same five stations. Scroll to travel.

01 — the underline

Every page opens with a line under a name.

Fly along it once, instead of past it.

02 — the tempo curve

The plateau is a place you pass through.

From inside, flat has length. Then the climb has height.

03 — the loop

It comes back around.

Acquire, activate, retain, refer — you're inside the circle this time.

04 — the staircase

Compounding, one tread at a time.

Height you can finally feel underfoot.

05 — the knot

Tied off — until the next entry.

A pulse runs the wire home. ← back to the bench

Scroll
to descend

EXP. 011 — Notes

Depth, instead of height

What is literally happening: your scroll position no longer moves the page down — it moves a camera along a curved path in 3D space, with damping so the motion has weight. The path is the site's red thread rebuilt as geometry; captions fade in at measured stations along the curve, and the vermillion is used as light, not paint. Perspective projection does the rest: things ahead are small, then they are around you.

In any scroll story the author controls the sequence but the reader controls the speed. Mapping scroll to travel returns the path to the author without taking the reader's hands off the wheel — you decide what they pass and in what order; they decide how long to stand in front of it.

The applied version: product tours, case studies, onboarding. Build the argument as stations on a line, then measure where people stop — every station is a funnel step, and a station nobody reaches is a slide nobody needed.

On paper the thread was a line you looked at. Here you stand on it. The same distance that used to be height is now depth, and the difference is the difference between reading about a road and walking one — the argument doesn't scroll past you; you arrive at it.

  1. Mechanism under test: scroll as a camera track (after wlt.design) — the page has almost no height of its own; scrolling advances a damped parameter that dollies a camera along a 3D path.
  2. Subject: the site's vermillion thread, rebuilt as a line in space with its five stations — underline, tempo curve, loop, staircase, knot — lit as a source instead of drawn as ink.
  3. Copy stays DOM: everything readable is HTML floating over the canvas. The GPU renders scenery only.
  4. What might graduate: the damped-follower scroll grammar; accent-as-light; stations as structure. The look stays here.

PHYSICS — raw WebGL2, no libraries, single file · seeded (mulberry32) · damped follower stops at ε (no idle frames; ambient gated by visibility) · reduced motion = this flat edition · no-GL = designed fallback · native scrollbar, no hijack.

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