WebGL a designer can actually ship
Technology
Unicorn Studio is a visual editor for interactive WebGL effects. The effect is authored on a canvas and embedded in the page, which moves shader work out of an engineer's queue without moving it off the GPU. The browser still pays for every frame.
We integrated it on Orb to handle advanced shaders and interactive motion, animations that respond to user behavior in real time, inside an otherwise ordinary Next.js and Sanity build. We also write shaders by hand on other projects. The two are not the same job.
Motion
What the editor is for, and what it will not do
- The shader stops being an engineering ticket
The effect is authored visually and embedded, so iteration happens with the person who has an opinion about how it should feel. On Orb that produced the shaders and interactive motion the site is known for, with no custom rendering layer living in the codebase.
- It does surfaces, not scenes with geometry
The tool is built for effects on a plane: distortion, gradients, particles, treatments on text and images that react to the pointer. A world with geometry, a camera, and real depth is still a Three.js job, and picking the wrong one of those shows up late.
- A canvas is pixels to everything else
Text inside a WebGL effect is invisible to a screen reader and to a crawler, so the content stays in the DOM and the effect sits behind it. Continuous motion needs a reduced motion path and a still fallback for weaker GPUs. Neither of those is automatic.
