Showroom · Make-of

How Reliquary was made

Five works of art the world lost, each kept as a constellation: a photograph dissolved into forty thousand points of light, hung with its four companions in one slow-turning sky. Scrolling flies you between them; in motion the light smears into star-streams, and at rest it settles back into an image.

What it demonstrates

That a particle site can be a place rather than a performance. The five relics are not slides on a timeline — they are permanent residents of one navigable space, and the camera is the only thing that moves. Elsewhere in this showroom, Mireille assembles a single image out of chaos as you scroll; Reliquary's subject is a collection: everything stays resolved, and the drama comes from flying between the rooms. The second thing it shows is restraint with truth — the museum copy is real (each theft and loss checks out), and every plaque says honestly which photograph its constellation was sampled from.

Techniques, honestly named

• Luminance-weighted photograph sampling — each source photo is drawn to an offscreen canvas and read pixel by pixel; a brightness-weighted distribution decides which pixels earn points, brightness pushes each point into depth, and the cloud is recentred on its luminous centroid so the framing is exact.
• One geometry, one draw call — all five relics, a shell of a few thousand background stars and the near-field dust motes live in a single buffer; a per-point index selects that artifact's own rotation and birth time in the vertex shader.
• Previous-frame velocity smear — the shader keeps last frame's view-projection matrix, measures each point's on-screen travel, and stretches the sprite into a capsule along that direction. Fast flight becomes star-streams; a settled camera means zero smear, with no post-processing pass.
• A camera spline with a dwell at every station — scroll drives one parameter along a Catmull-Rom curve through all six stops, eased so the camera lingers at each relic and accelerates between them; the plaques are a fixed HUD faded in sync with the flight.
• Respectful fallbacks — context loss pauses and rebuilds, reduced motion gets a static, fully resolved museum in normal document flow (re-rendered per scroll, never animated), and no WebGL leaves the five true stories readable.

Recreate it