Michael Modena from Forged.build just dropped a holiday snow globe that's way more technically interesting than it has any right to be. It's a Christmas card, sure, but one where a Porsche 911 GT3 drifts inside a tiny glass dome filled with volumetric snow that actually responds to light. The whole thing is built in WebGPU. Modena used compute shaders to fill the entire volume of the globe with mesh-based snow particles that generate proper normals, so the lighting behaves correctly as the camera moves around. The glass dome itself became a stress test for lighting across curved, reflective surfaces (refraction, distortion, highlights that bend with the camera angle). If any of that falls apart, the illusion breaks, but it holds together really nicely.

There's also a fun AI video intro that uses a real-time chroma-key pipeline Modena built. Instead of hard cuts, he treats AI-generated footage as a raw ingredient that can be keyed out (green or blue screen) and blended directly into the interactive WebGPU scene. It's a scrappy approach but opens up some interesting possibilities for mixing generative video with real-time graphics. The whole project has this low-pressure experimental vibe where lighting research, volumetric rendering, and AI workflows collide in something that's equal parts technical demo and playful nonsense (a precision sports car sliding around a miniature winter wonderland).

Check out the live experience and give the snow globe a spin, or dig into the full case study where Modena breaks down the technical decisions. You can also follow his work at Forged.build for more experiments at the intersection of lighting, interaction, and compute shaders.