- Grape
- Serve
- In the glass
One room, one glass, one record, lit by the sky that is actually over you right now.
The sun is where the sun is. Its position comes from the date and the hour where you are, the color coming through the window is what your atmosphere does to sunlight at this exact moment, and the weather at the window is your weather. Lean in. Put the record on. Or tell the table what kind of evening it is and it will pour you something else and find the record to go with it. The place named at the bottom of the page is a door too – tap it and the room will move to any city on earth.
One self-contained file. The room is modeled and rendered in three.js, so the furniture, the glass, the pour and the sleeves are all geometry and canvas drawn in the page as you watch. The one photograph in the room is the painting over the credenza, and it never stops changing: the wall asks Wikimedia Commons, live, for a painting to suit the hour, the weather and the place you are reading from – an evening in Honolulu might hang D. Howard Hitchcock or Charles Bartlett, a wet midnight a nocturne, a Paris morning a boulevard. Only public-domain work is hung: every candidate’s license is checked as it arrives and anything still in copyright is passed over. Tap the painting to walk up to it, and again to read what it is – every canvas is titled, dated and credited in its card, with a link back to Commons. (If nothing can be fetched, an Edward Hopper stays on the nail.) Sun position is the NOAA solar calculation including atmospheric refraction; the sky is Rayleigh scattering and aerosol extinction integrated through Kasten–Young air mass, which is why sunset reddens because of physics rather than because of a gradient. Depth of field, 4× MSAA and SMAA run through a post-processing chain. The room tone – rain, wind, birds, the hum of the building – is synthesized live with the Web Audio API from the same conditions. No samples.
Everything the room fetches, precisely: your approximate location and the current weather, so the sky is right. Album artwork through Apple’s iTunes Search API, which is why the jacket on the table is the real cover – when Apple has nothing, the page draws its own. The record itself through YouTube’s embedded player, from the rights holder’s own channel wherever one exists, and from nowhere at all when it does not. And the paintings, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain only, license-checked one by one.
The wine is not a recommendation engine. Every pairing runs over the same four numbers – weight, brightness, texture, motion – carried by both the cellar and the shelf, which is why you can change the record and keep a wine that still suits it, or change the wine and keep a record that still suits the hour.
I’m Chase Conching – a designer/developer in Honolulu making a series of small experiments at chase.is. Everything here really works: real data, real physics, real time. If you’d like that kind of care on your own project, say hello.
say hello → chase@chase.is github ↗ linkedin ↗
Weather from Open-Meteo · location from ipwho.is · album artwork from the iTunes Search API · paintings from Wikimedia Commons, public domain · playback by YouTube · three.js. Apple, Apple Music and YouTube are trademarks of their respective owners.