Notes ·
Holocloth Turns Uploaded Artwork into Interactive Holographic Fabric
Holocloth is a beautifully made browser experiment that lets you drape images and SVGs across a simulated sheet of holographic fabric.
You can grab the cloth, throw it around, fold it over itself and watch the artwork respond to every wrinkle. The material combines iridescent diffraction, reflections, sparkle, bump mapping, depth of field, ambient occlusion, bloom and film grain. Finished compositions can be exported as transparent PNGs.
The simulation was built by Dmitry Kurash using React, Three.js and WebGL 2. The cloth physics use a custom Verlet integration system rather than an external physics engine, while the visual effects are implemented with custom GLSL shaders. The complete project is also available as open source under the MIT license.
This is the kind of web experiment I love. It does not need an account, a tutorial or an explanation before it becomes fun. You open it, start pulling on the fabric and immediately understand what it can do.
It is also a great example of how much creative software can now run directly in a browser. What initially feels like a small visual toy is really a capable interactive design tool built from physics, shaders and a carefully considered interface.