Holobox: A CSS 3D cube that reacts to device orientation

hakim.se

28 points·hakim··10 comments

Very cool tech demo, however inversing the up/down transformation would make it feel proper 3d, as in that the box "remains the same" while you move your iPad, giving the illusion that it's in the iPad.

Works perfectly on an iPad but doesn't feel intuitive at all.

Sorry to sound negative but I never understand why if someone goes to the bother of making something like this. Why they can't provide a checkbox to allow users on a desktop (without gyroscopes) to interact via mouse and see the effect.

There's no checkbox but it does use mouse events when visited on desktop browsers. Requires a webkit browser with support for CSS 3D transforms though.

Since this works only on such a small subset of runtimes (it only manages to slow down my Android browser), you might as well write in ActiveX and slap a HTML5 doctype to it.

Kudos on the hackery, don't get me wrong, I'm all for taking devices where they weren't meant to go. My issue is with a world where this kind of fragmented support will again become common, just when we were starting to have a grip on actual standards.

I think the whole point of this experiment is to try out a new and cool piece of tech that might not be supported across the browser spectrum just yet but it doesn't mean that it won't be ever.

Just look at the many other CSS specs that were not supported across browsers only a few years ago but now are considered official standards by the W3C and all the major browser developers.

Doesn't work on Android / Nexus One CM7.

That's too bad. I should have mentioned that this has only been tested on iOS.

FYI, this doesn't appear to be working on my generation 1 iPhone.

Nice on desktop safari.

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