Ever wanted to walk through ancient Persepolis like it's 518 BC? The team at Media.Monks teamed up with the Getty Museum to build exactly that in Persepolis Reimagined, and it's a seriously impressive piece of WebGL engineering. This isn't just another museum site with a 3D viewer tacked on. It's a full-scale recreation of the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, rendered in real-time right in your browser.

What makes this technically interesting is how they handled the sheer scale. You're navigating through massive palace complexes with intricate reliefs, towering bull statues, and detailed architectural elements, all while maintaining smooth performance on mobile and desktop. The Media.Monks dev team (including WebGL wizards Reinder Nijhoff and Johan Holwerda, with UX design by Angela Sanchez Mezquita and project direction from Dennis de Rooij) leaned hard into WebGL 2.0 features like instancing to render all that geometry efficiently. They also built a frustum culling system to skip rendering what you can't see and used LOD (level of detail) techniques to keep triangle counts reasonable. One clever touch: the experience opens with a seamless transition from rendered video into the WebGL scene, avoiding that jarring "loading 3D" moment. The team worked closely with Getty curators and UCLA historians to get the historical details right, from paint pigments to cedar roof textures. If you're interested in more details, check out Getty's article.

Check out the project and explore how they pulled off city-scale WebGL. The project racked up some serious awards (FWA of the Year, Awwwards Developer of the Year) and it's easy to see why once you start scrolling through those palace halls.