ethereal.dev

What if the monitor you already sit in front of could become a window into another place? Ethereal is a proof of concept for exactly that, inspired by Johnny Lee’s famous 2007 Wii Remote head tracking demo. The webcam finds your eyes, and every frame the page redraws its scene from exactly where you are sitting. Lean to one side and you see around the corner of a room that seems to sit behind the glass. There are no headsets, no special hardware, and nothing to install: just a laptop camera and a web page.

Behind the demos is a small TypeScript library that drives either Three.js scenes or plain HTML with CSS 3D, with guided calibration and diagnostics tools. It is open source and installs straight from GitHub. Ethereal was also one of my first complex projects built entirely with Claude Code; I never touched the code by hand. The whole story is in this blog entry.