There's something quietly unsettling about walking through a museum built to hold things that shouldn't be missing. The UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects is exactly that: a WebGL-powered space housing 240+ looted artifacts, from Ming Dynasty bronze Buddhas to a Syrian gold pendant ripped from Palmyra, all rendered in 3D inside an architecture modeled after a baobab tree. The tree was the vision of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, and it works as metaphor in a way that feels earned rather than forced. Roots, heritage, things that hold a community upright. The whole experience moves with a smoothness that belies how heavy the subject matter is. Soft earth tones, careful lighting, infinite scroll pulling you deeper into rooms organized by region and recovery status. Immersive without being loud.

The build comes from makemepulse, the Paris-based interactive studio. If you've followed their work (Riot Games, Spotify, Dior, the BAYC site), you know they generally use NanoGL, their in-house WebGL micro-framework. Thin wrappers around the WebGL API, modular PBR materials, and a state management system that minimizes GL state changes between renders. The philosophy is simple: if you want complex things to run fast, you need to know what's happening under the hood.

What's particularly clever is the 3D reconstruction pipeline. Many of these stolen objects exist only as photographs, so the team built a generative AI workflow to transform flat references into full 3D models, then hand-finished them to restore not just shape but texture, material, presence. Lightmapping leans on Houdini for baking, giving them non-destructive iteration on UV density and scene lighting. The frontend runs Vue.js on top of the NanoGL canvas. A serious production stack applied to a serious problem, and it never once feels like a tech demo. Go spend some time inside. Browse by region. Read the restitution stories.