Branch

Branch is a web experience. You travel down a fallen branch and the life it shelters is revealed under your cursor: mosses, fungi, insects. Three worlds told through the scroll, informed by the French forestry office's resources on dead wood.

• 01

  The reveal is computed point by point

  A 320 x 180 texture holds, for every point of the image, the exact moment the cursor passed over it. The shader derives its age and fetches the matching growth state: the moss grows where the hand went, starting when it went there. This is not a reveal mask, it is a field of timestamps.

• 02

  32 growth states in video memory

  The film is sampled into 32 frames, tightened to a tenth of a second while the vegetation takes hold, and uploaded four at a time into a WebGL2 texture array: 1920 x 1080 on desktop, 1024 x 576 on phones.

• 03

  What has grown stays

  Each point plays its 2.8 seconds and then holds, with no retraction and no flicker. "Clear your trail" resets the whole field.

• 04

  Three fallbacks planned for

  With no WebGL2 or no sequence, the site falls back to a fixed before/after. Under reduced motion, it shows the grown state directly. On a touch screen, where there is no cursor to follow, a button reveals the whole scene.

• 05

  Scrolling stays native

  Nothing intercepts the wheel and no scrollbar is driven: a short sticky hold is enough to keep the shot while you move into the material, and the page scrolls like any other.

• 06

  The framing holds at every size

  Pixel density is capped at 1.7 on desktop and 1.5 on phones, and the crop is recomputed on every resize to keep the photograph's 16:9 without ever distorting the branch.