Find Your Way to Oz: The 2013 Chrome Experiment

Back in 2013, UNIT9 and Google Creative Labs shipped one of the most ambitious Chrome Experiments ever made for Disney. Find Your Way to Oz drops you into a dusty Kansas carnival rendered entirely in WebGL and CSS3, then lets a tornado swallow the whole thing. You wander at your own pace through circus tents, compose tunes on a vintage music organ, snap photos in a multi-plane photo booth powered by WebRTC, and build stop-motion movies with a zoetrope. Then the sky goes dark. The tornado sequence alone is worth the visit: a custom volumetric GLSL shader, originally adapted from an animation built to map the inside of a mouse brain cell, repurposed here to simulate a swirling vortex you can orbit freely. That is the kind of creative recycling you don't forget.

What's technically wild is how much faking is going on. There's no physics simulation for wind. The team couldn't afford one in browser-era 2013 JavaScript, so they invented a convincing illusion of it. Grass sways, fabric ripples, debris scatters, and none of it is physically "real." The spatial audio engine by Plan8 does heavy lifting too, shifting the soundscape dynamically as you move, which tricks your brain into buying the whole scene even harder. The entire 3D environment, the layered CSS3 DOM animations, the getUserMedia camera tricks: all of it was stitched together in roughly three months by a distributed team spanning multiple countries. It shipped in a browser tab. In 2013. Let that sit.

The source is fully open on GitHub at unit9/oz, so if you want to dissect those shaders or study how they structured the scene graph, go for it. You can also append ?debug=on to the URL, load it up, then press Ctrl+i to unlock a hidden menu that lets you fly the camera freely and tweak the environment. The project was directed by Anrick Bregman with Silvio Paganini as technical lead. Silvio now hosts the experience at oz.fluuu.id through his creative collective FLUUUID, keeping it alive long after the original domain went dark.