Prism Protocol
An immersive WebGL experience built for a generative art platform — where every interaction refracts light differently.
A platform where generative art lives
Prism Protocol needed a digital home that matched the ambition of the art it hosts. The brief was open: make it feel like you're inside the work, not looking at it from outside. We took that literally.
The result is a full-screen WebGL environment where the interface itself is part of the aesthetic. Navigation surfaces through gesture. Collections emerge from particle fields. Every transition is physically motivated.
Performance without compromise
The core tension was between visual fidelity and accessibility. A platform for art collectors needs to look extraordinary — and needs to load in under two seconds on a mobile connection.
We solved this by building a tiered rendering system: a lightweight CSS/SVG shell loads instantly, the WebGL layer is progressive-enhanced in, and shader complexity scales with device capability. The result is the same visual language at every tier.
Designing in the medium
We prototyped directly in Three.js from week one. No static mockups. The motion and material decisions were made in real-time, in the browser, against real content. This let us catch problems that would have been invisible in Figma — like how the iridescent glass effect reads against dark photography versus light.
The shader system was designed to be data-driven: every artwork on the platform can specify its own light temperature, refraction index, and caustic density. The environment adapts to the art, not the other way around.
"Working with Liquid felt like building in a new material. The browser stopped being a canvas and became a substance — one that refracts, bends, and surprises."
A new benchmark for the category
Launch week confirmed what we'd hoped: the work translated beyond the studio. The collector community said it finally felt like a place worth spending time in — not just a gallery but an environment.
The codebase is fully componentised and documented. The Prism team now maintains it independently, adding new collections without touching the core rendering engine. That was always the goal.