Active Theory is a Venice Beach-based creative studio that's been pushing WebGL to its limits since 2012. Their portfolio site alone is worth the visit: you scroll through fully immersive 3D environments inspired by their LA and Amsterdam offices, complete with flickering neon lights, alien-tinged fonts, and an AI chat that'll actually navigate you around the portfolio if you ask it things like "show me a fun project."

Under the hood, everything runs on Hydra, their proprietary framework they've been building and refining. It started as a way to stay agile during the Flash-to-HTML5 transition, but it's grown into a full 3D engine with a visual GUI that lets designers build scenes without touching code. They've moved toward a state-based, functional programming style in recent years, which helps keep the codebase modular and fast. The performance numbers back it up: despite heavy shader work, the site clocks an LCP around 1.3 seconds on desktop thanks to Draco-compressed meshes and lazy-loaded video. The founders come from the golden era of experimental web dev and you can feel that DNA in everything they ship.