Holographic Terrain

A scroll-driven landing page on a procedurally generated terrain, drawn entirely with glowing contour lines.

A real-time landscape made of nothing but lines. The terrain chapter of this site is its descendant.

What it does

• Two octaves of Perlin noise lift a plane on the GPU; the land drifts towards the camera and fades into fog
• Elevation is sliced into bands and drawn as anti-aliased contour lines of constant width
• Each section of the page has its own camera angle, terrain height and palette, and scrolling blends between them
• Scroll faster and the colours and the terrain rush with you
• A playground with live controls for elevation, line density, glow and palette

What I cared about

That it holds up on a phone. Fewer vertices on small screens, a capped pixel ratio that drops when frames get slow and recovers afterwards, and full support for reduced motion and keyboard navigation.