Gold mosaic whose tiles fly as flocks
An 80-second square film of a glass and gold-leaf mosaic whose loose tiles lift off as a fish, cranes, and a dove, flip to a starry night face, then spiral apart and snap back. It is one HTML file in WebGL2, with all sound synthesized in the browser.
“Well this is something new... Opus 5.5 by itself.”
Make an 80 second square animated film as a single HTML file, using WebGL2 and plain JavaScript, with no libraries and no image, font or audio files. It should look like a glass and gold leaf wall mosaic whose tiles were never glued down, so they can lift, flip, fly and click back into place. Figures are flocks of tiles, so a fish swims by its tiles swimming
Make it yours. Change the material ("glass and gold leaf wall mosaic") and the figure line ("a fish swims by its tiles swimming"). Keep "single HTML file, using WebGL2 and plain JavaScript, with no libraries and no image, font or audio files" for the same self-contained build.
You'll need
- A browser with WebGL2 to open the HTML file
How it was made
The creator ran Opus 5.5 at the medium reasoning setting. The agent's readout, posted in the thread, gives the scene timeline and the fixes it made after checking the film frame by frame: it recolored the fish so it stood out from the gold, held the flocks tighter, softened the reflections and the plaster stripes, and sped up the inner spiral. It also lists two rough spots it left in.
Posted Sep 22, 2026 · X · 1k likes · 132k views · 26 comments
Prompt from: Reply on X. The prompt ends without a final period in the original.
Look notesby Reference
A wall mosaic of small glass and gold-leaf tiles, seen straight on in a square frame: a gold day face with a fish, birds, a sun, and a sail over bands of sea, and a navy night face with silver stars and a crescent moon.
- Color
- Gold leaf and ochre inside a brick-red and cobalt border, teal and ultramarine sea bands, and an orange-and-blue fish. The night face is navy with silver-white tiles, and the bare wall behind is dark brown.
- Type
- No text.
- Framing
- The mosaic fills the square edge to edge. Lifted figures cast soft shadows on the wall, and in one frame every tile is gathered into a spiral over the bare backing.
- Structure
- The gold day wall, the fish's tiles down in the sea with a dark fish-shaped gap left behind, the wall restored, birds and sail lifted off the wall, the navy night face, a silver bird of tiles crossing it, the stars clustered together, the spiral of all the tiles, then the day wall back in place.
