FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Websites Transformed Into 3D Sculptures

Visually, the internet can be a real yawn. Websites like the one you are staring at right now are projected as a flat plane of text and images on your flat monitor. Any sense of depth you perceive is merely a trick of design.
Janus Rose
New York, US

Visually, the internet can be a real yawn. Websites like the one you are staring at right now are projected as a flat plane of text and images on your flat monitor. Any sense of depth you perceive is merely a trick of design, fashioned to elicit the absurd sense that the thing inside your screen has thickness and substance to it. But what if our places on the web, instead of relying on the trompe l'oeil voodoo of gradients and drop-shadows, became 3D objects?

Advertisement

Can't See 3D is a project by Kim Asendorf and Jonathan Pirnay that attempts to challenge the uniform flatness of the internet by turning websites into digital sculptures. Using the algorithm they've built, the website allows visitors to submit a web address and get in line for a 3D makeover. Then it captures whatever lies at the address, generates a 3D object (or many 3D objects), slaps on the site as a texture and sends back a snapshot to the Can't See 3D website. Eventually.

An overwhelming response has brought the site's turnaround down to about 8 images per hour, a limitation imposed by Tumblr's regulations on file uploads. But utilizing the microblogging service allows the artists to have a running feed of visually abstracted web spaces submitted from across the internet. Sites with charts and maps work particularly well, gaining topographical qualities that mimic rough-edged computer generated landscapes. Others are completely deconstructed and reassembled into various floating geometric shapes. It sort of looks like if Picasso had a blog.

See for yourself: