Penderecki's Garden: A Point-Cloud Memorial Built Using Photogrammetry

Krzysztof Penderecki wrote music that made Kubrick's films more terrifying and Scorsese's more haunted. He also spent decades obsessively planting 1,500 species of trees on a twenty-hectare estate in a tiny Polish village called Lusławice. Penderecki's Garden is the unlikely meeting point of those two obsessions: a WebGL experience that reconstructs the physical garden as a drifting cosmos of point-cloud particles, threaded with the composer's own music. You navigate through chapters like The Labyrinth (where 15,000 hornbeams conceal fragments of his compositions) and The Studio (where a 3D scan of the manor shifts color and form in response to an oboe capriccio). It is enormous, strange, and genuinely moving. Wear headphones.

The team behind it is Huncwot, a Warsaw creative agency. They flew drones over the real garden, captured it via photogrammetry, and ended up with billions of particles they then spent months compressing into something a browser could actually render. The stack is Three.js, TypeScript, GSAP, and custom GLSL shaders that give the particles a subtle organic sway, like leaves you almost remember. The Web Audio API pipes Penderecki's compositions through an analyzer that ties sound to particle motion, so the garden literally breathes with the music. Hotspots aren't DOM overlays; they're SVG textures baked into the WebGL layer for performance. And the whole thing is fully keyboard-navigable, which is vanishingly rare for a WebGL project of this scope.

Spend time with the individual chapters, especially The Park (where over 55 hand-drawn botanical illustrations sit alongside the particle scans) and The Music Salon (which pairs full recordings with sharp contextual writing). On mobile, the gyroscope lets you physically look around the garden. There's even a Google Cardboard VR path buried in there. It's the kind of project that justifies the phrase "digital experience" by actually being one.