Site experiment · first seen June 17, 2026

The Desk That Learned Depth

The homepage desk is one set of objects in two views. The 2D collage gives you the portrait, papers, and records at a glance; the 3D cliff room lets you step inside them. Switching views keeps the same music and discoveries instead of starting over.

Shared 2D/3D state Reciprocal room Model provenance Screenshot QA

Try the homepage desk Download reproduction MD

Why

I wanted the paper desk to feel like a place without making the quick 2D homepage slower to read.

What

Two views of the same room, with the same records, papers, music, and discoveries.

Try

Switch views, play a record, find a hidden card, and check that it is still there when you switch back.

Why the desk has two views

I liked how quickly the 2D collage introduced the papers, portrait, and records, but I also wanted visitors to wander through that little world. The first 3D version copied the desk into a small stage. At ordinary screen sizes, furniture disappeared, dropped cards floated, rear turns exposed blank space, and the outside looked like a separate dollhouse.

The fix was not more decoration. I made inside and outside two camera views of the same room, then shared the record player and discoveries with the 2D desk.

Two eras, four frames

The four frames hold everything I could keep constant: the same route, 1440 × 1000 viewport, light theme, Yellow Submarine stopped, and an empty discovery pile. Each pair starts in 2D and changes only the view. The June pair is an exact-commit replay; the July pair is the accepted checkpoint.

GPT-5.5 / xhigh provenance

June 21: the first room

Source 588e36509 · captured July 16

The collage already read well. The 3D view was a small stage sitting inside a black field.

Exact replay of commit 588e36509 in the light-theme 2D homepage view, with Sirui's portrait, research slips, and a coffee-stain desk cue — 2D — the collage already held a clear portrait, research thesis, slips, and desk cue.

Exact replay of commit 588e36509 in the light-theme 3D homepage view, where a small desk-room stage occupies the right half while a black backdrop obscures much of the page — 3D — the room was still a small stage, and its black backdrop overwhelmed the page around it.

GPT-5.6 Sol/ultra provenance

July 16: one room, viewed from both sides

Runtime source 8fc9bf7d3 · accepted scene 1b07cea4c

The 2D state now carries into the same room viewed from inside or outside. Yellow Submarine remains queued and the discovery pile remains empty in both frames.

July 16 homepage capture in the light-theme 2D desk representation with Sirui's portrait, paper research slips, Yellow Submarine queued and stopped, and no discovered record cards — 2D default view — Yellow Submarine stopped, with zero discoveries.

July 16 homepage capture in the light-theme 3D desk representation showing the reciprocal cliff room, onsen, lounge chair, record player, welcome note, and ocean window, with Yellow Submarine stopped and no discoveries — 3D default view — the same stopped record and empty discovery state inside the reciprocal room.

The labels record the model context for each era; this is a comparison of design history rather than isolated model performance. The prompt, retained context, task, implementation history, and my critique all changed too. “Codex 5.5 tried its best” remains visible because it belonged to the June interface.

What I kept, cut, and still want to improve

Kept

The visible 2D | 3D switch, shared music and discoveries, paper-and-record identity, and clear ways to look outside and return.

Cut

The shallow stage, hand-matched exterior miniature, floating-card recovery, and camera framing that hid the furniture.

Keep the room shape, then test the stone, lighting, materials, and controls on more phones and high-DPI laptops.

Technical provenance and checkpoint ledger

The interaction-state contract is shared. Renderer metadata remains intentionally asymmetric because only the July checkpoint recorded the higher-DPR buffer policy.

Common rubric: homepage route, 1440 × 1000 viewport, light theme, and default 2D or 3D view.
June replay: exact source 588e36509, one fresh Chromium 145 context, Yellow Submarine stopped, zero discoveries, 2D then mode switch only, device-pixel ratio 1, no console or page errors.
July detail: runtime source 8fc9bf7d3 carried Yellow Submarine stopped, zero discoveries, a simulated device-pixel ratio of 3, and a WebGL buffer capped near 2×. The reciprocal architecture was accepted in 1b07cea4c.
Interpretation: GPT-5.5/xhigh and GPT-5.6 Sol/ultra record the model context for each era; the comparison evaluates the resulting design history.

Jun 17c8ed8e5daAdded the visible 2D | 3D switch and the first Three.js desk room during the GPT-5.5/xhigh provenance period.
Jun 21588e36509Created an artifact/evidence checkpoint with 2D, room, outside, zoom, and album-state captures.
Jul 12840a3e1cbDuring the GPT-5.6 Sol/ultra provenance period, rebuilt anchors, rear-orbit clearance, compact framing, raycasts, and grounded card recovery.
Jul 13a765c5291Replaced the hand-matched exterior miniature with the actual room graph under reciprocal cameras.
Jul 141b07cea4cAccepted the organic room shell, high cliff aperture, welcome and window cues, and live-geometry/raycast evidence across the full matrix. Material realism remains open headroom.
Jul 142ffd379afStabilized window-hit bounds, canvas click suppression, and deterministic reset tests after visual acceptance.

Credit and provenance

The desk’s playful artifact language adapts an interaction lesson from Jackie Hu’s portfolio: small objects should reveal something real about the person. The room, assets, state model, and implementation are original to this site.