Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio

For those that can't get it to load (it takes a minute, and I noticed my desktop's fan kick it up a notch while things were getting initialized, so... YMMV): this is a portfolio site done via a cozy-gaming-style AWSD game where you drive around in a jeep-like thingamabob. There are some cute easter eggs, including a sort of... shrine to each of the socials, which you can run into with your car and knock over (though the links remain clickable, of course!). It also looks like there's some degree of global state; for example, you can "sacrifice yourself to the gods of chaos" (ie drive into a portal) and a counter on the side of the portal goes up, presumably for everyone (since I certainly didn't drive into it 1700 times myself!). There's a strongly consistent art style, and just generally... seems pretty polished. Or at least, that's what it felt like after 5 minutes of driving around.

All in all I'd say, I'm impressed, and enjoyed it. Though I think the HN title ("handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites") is maybe a bit much. It's an extremely-well-executed portfolio site; no more, no less.

This got me thinking: Rewind 25 years, I can easily imagine 15 year-old me sinking DOZENS of hours into playing this "game". I remember I put much more time than that into a free game that came in a box of cereal[0].

Today, I loaded the site up and spend about 30 seconds on it before deciding "this is cool!" and moving on, probably never to return.

What changed? I guess it's a mix of: (A) How I value my time. (B) The bar for "what pulls me in" in terms of gaming. (C) Some other factor around me just having already burned enough hours on games.

I'm not really sure how much each factor contributes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

Bruno’s Threejs course is great. I’m about 2/3 the way through it, taking my time. Well organized and extremely well documented. Highly recommend, if a recommendation from a threejs novice is worth much.

Very neat! I and completely respect the skill. I respect the effort even more!

That said, it's not 'hands down, one of the coolest 3D websites', at least that I've seen. It's all "technical", very little "design". For example, why is it 'isometric overhead'? There's no particular benefit in the view, and it's specifically harder to control than it would be with a 'chase'/'third-person' camera. It's not like this is an RTS or a city-builder-ish thing, where having an overhead layout works to your benefit. Rather, it's just easier to program a camera that never changes angles and input controls that never have to re-interpret camera position/rotation (lookat vector) to function correctly. And there's a kind of symmetry between a flat page and the "ground" that the truck drives on, so some parts of the web forms have been ported over to that.

Again, none of that is bad and especially none of it is wrong. It's very cool that it works and works so well (technical)! It's just that the design feels more "portfolio" than it does "best ux for interacting with the environment I've created and the paradigms I've invoked (vehicle control)".

(2019) amazingly

Some behind the scenes from the Bruno himself:

https://medium.com/@bruno_simon/bruno-simon-portfolio-case-s...

I wish more of the web was like this. I miss the wild creativity of websites way back in the day. The web has mostly homogenized around what web UI should be. I love seeing weird experimental stuff made just for fun.

Does not work on Chrome, and actually freezes the tab

This is amazing; now when is building this kind of thing going to become more accessible so we can start seeing a lot more of it? Webassembly has been around for years now but we still don't really see many companies compiling games or game-lite experiences to WASM. The tooling doesn't seem to be there which is the necessary prerequisite that could make building experiences like this actually feasible for most devs. Is that coming, ever?

(shameless plug)

I love all the work that Bruno puts out there. His design and engineering skills are next level.

There are so many talented creatives using WebGL/WebGPU that I've recently launched WebGL.com / WebGPU.com, where I'm dedicated to bring together the community of creatives (designers, coders, AI/ML, etc.) pushing the boundaries of the web.

Would love to see what you would like to see (e.g. tutorials, demos, etc.)

Very cool, even works on mobile. Although, just a nit, driving with your finger frequently activates the long press menu in iOS and spoils things.

Works fine on my android phone. Impressive.

Building a good spatial website is so so high on my must do list.

Alas, the state of WebComponents for 3d / spatial is so so. A-frame is still CJS only & won't work with my unbundled setup because of that, but that's sort of on me. Lume.io wraps three.js too and looks tempting, has a neat signals & cool behavioral classes. https://aframe.io/examples/ https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/issues/4242 https://lume.io/

Previously:

Bruno Simon – 3D Curriculum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362200 - Oct 2019 (42 comments)

It's cool, but I actually find it pretty bad as a website. The UX for navigating and all that, it's bad. I was hoping for some innovation in UX which justifies the use of 3D in the website.

Okay, bruno-simon.com is probably the coolest portfolio I've ever seen. You get to DRIVE A LITTLE TRUCK around a 3D world to see his projects! It's fun, intuitive, and technically impressive. The attention to detail is insane. Don't visit if you have a deadline—you'll get stuck there! #webdev #threejs #creativecoding

This is so insanely detailed I wonder how long it took him to build

This is very impressive as an art project, but terrible as an actual home page. It’s slow as molasses and difficult to navigate. Microsoft Bob failed for a reason.

I have a 4 yo, and I'm very reluctant to let him into the games world. But I've been thinking of buying a small Super Mario USB steering wheel and let him roam a very simple world like this. Anyone aware of something like this, maybe open source so that i can simplify to the simplest dynamics?

I'm old enough to remember the SGI tractor-trailer demo wagon where they were demonstrating their latest, $20K+, wares that could do immersive 3D graphics that were... crude compared to this. This was sometime in the 1990s.

And by now my kids play fluidly immersive 3D games, on the web, on the kind of computers you can get for $10 off Facebook Marketplace.

Amazing as always, Bruno is a wizard with ThreeJS.

There’s a surprising amount of stutter and lag on iOS, evident after the loading bar completes and the app freezes for 30 sec. Also during gameplay, quite a bit of stuttering. My guess is GPU texture uploads or shader compilations. Otherwise it was buttery smooth.

It looks really nice, but CPU usage is almost 100% all the time. I have a MacBook Pro M3. When I open some fancy Three.js scenes that I found on the net, I instantly profile them. Most of them are really bad in terms of performance. I don't know why.

This is unbelievable. So whimsical and fun and different...I really appreciated the attention to detail and joy that clearly went into it. Got to spend some time playing the racing game with my son and we can't figure out how people got 20 seconds...is there a speed boost?

Anyway, super fun.

Wow crashed Firefox on MacOS straight to desktop. Not even just the tab, the entire application.

Woohoo, I got number 10,000 on the altar! https://youtu.be/4KYI8CgGrLw

Now who was there with me running it up at the same time :)

Takes a min to load even when it shows the circle complete. But a 1-2xrefreshes load it and yes, it is pretty sick. Wish you could zoom out more though. Nice work to Bruno!

I enjoyed poking around to look for how to get the debug menu and hacker achievement, that's a nice touch to encourage you to peek into the source.

Pleasant and nicely done. Took me a few seconds to figure out how I was suppose to drive around but very pleasant experience.

Looks great, but it lags a bit on my phone with a Snapdragon 855 and 12 GB of RAM. I really like the vehicle controls.

I used to play a game called Pro-Am on Nintendo. This game reminds me so much of that. The controls are basically the same.

It just shows me a black screen (Firefox).

I see just a black background. Are you sure this is a website and not just chrome-only experiment?

This is quite nice. I wonder why doesn't he make games instead of being a web developer?

I watched all the dev vlogs on YouTube. This is a true masterpiece. Kudos to Bruno

Awesome concept, but loading took 30 seconds and too many studders/lag on my phone.

11/10 creativity.

MY 24GB of RAM struggles with this

Gotta admit, I knew the OnlyFans action button was a risky click, and I did it anyways ....

Nice! Ok, any list or core libraries used to help to create something like this?

Cool indeer but i want to see someone from hr driving to that work experience driveway

dang that froze my browser starting up on mbp 16" but yeah it's legit the truck you can drive around with arrow keys

let's see ATS parse this

the collision physics on individual items like chairs is pretty cool

damn map has no boundary ha, weather system? damn

Absolutely beautiful! Thank You for the polished experience.

Cruising around when suddenly I see a tooltip with the N word pop up

HN hug of death? I couldn't get it to load (beyond the grid/circle background) on Safari/Mac, but eventually it loaded in Chrome. Seems to just be a game - use AWSD keys. Not sure why this is "coolest 3D website" in this day and age.

Impressive! Very cool that it works on mobile too

Love the design and programming (tested on Brave browser)

Impressively playable on iPhone safari

Reminds me of RC Pro Am :-)

Does not work on Firefox :(

my macbook hung big time opening this

Very Cool Indeed :)

The course is great. I am a fan. This, not so much.

One of the unsung problems of any technology is understanding what you can do with it that you could not do before. Lets say you are a prehistoric person and somehow you find a modern steel axe. What do you do with it? Ultimately, it is not the axe that is important, it is the metallurgy.

Lets say you are a modern person and you found bitcoin. What do you do with it? Again, my thought is not the bitcoin, it is the cryptographic technology.

Lets say you are a modern person and you find threejs. What do you do with it? My personal reaction is that there is so much more that can be done with threejs, react-three-fiber, react-three drei, shaders, shadertoys, than this.

For me the definition of "cool" is things that change how you see the world. Where you never look at things the same way. A little example for me was this:

https://codepen.io/prisoner849/full/wBGQYvy

works on Brave :) and actually fery cool :)

Holy shit, this is really cool. i felt like i was in a movie. the car blows up and is ready to go right away; the car drives in the water (faster if you hold down the space bar). music is nice; and the 3d rendering is also pretty smooth. love it.

So beautiful!

does not work on internet explorer

Wow!

[dead]

Works well on Safari 26.1, nice "game-dev" example, but not clear if it's a demo or a personal website: if former then nice, if latter then unusable

This is a cool website but it's hardly groundbreaking. There have been hundreds (thousands?) of three.js/babylon.js in-browser demos over the past decade and this would qualify as top 10% area, but there's nothing here that hasn't been done before. It's fun, it's high quality, but it's not new, and as far as conveying useful information, it's actually quite cumbersome with high effort for low signal. And while it's polished, it doesn't come close to even the most basic indie 3d game.