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changelog

Changelog

What shipped, week by week. Each entry is one meaningful beat, not a raw commit list. The build chip on the title screen always points to the newest one.

  1. 2026-10-30 · v2026.10.30

    Thank you for coming

    • ·Until a couple of weeks ago this site saw a few hundred visits a day. In October alone it has had 250k+ page views, and 2k+ of you signed up. That is page views, not people, but either way it is far more than I was ready for.
    • ·A lot of what follows in this log is the result. You found the bugs, and the worst ones came from phones. Thank you for the patience, and for the messages. I am reading them.
    • ·There is a short note saying the same thing on the home page now.

  2. 2026-10-25 · v2026.10.25.3

    The game sends much less about your session, and fewer false crash reports

    • ·The analytics allowance for the month ran out on 22 October in the surge. Most of what used it up was noise: frame-rate samples from every session, a view counted several times per visit, one error repeating thousands of times from a handful of people. Now only a small sample of sessions send performance data, and a repeat is sent once. The privacy opt-out in Settings works exactly as before.
    • ·When Chrome loses the graphics card, the errors that follow are expected while the game recovers, and they are kept quiet. Chrome words them in a way the game did not recognise, so they were reported as new crashes, almost three hundred people’s worth. That wording is now recognised.

  3. 2026-10-25 · v2026.10.25.2

    Tapping the screen on an iPhone no longer throws an error

    • ·iPhones and iPads have no pointer lock, and a tap on the place asked for it anyway. On every iOS browser that threw an error on every tap. More than 1,400 people hit it in the first four days of the surge. The ask now checks first, and a refusal on any browser is treated as "no lock today" instead of an error. Desktop behaves exactly as before.

  4. 2026-10-25 · v2026.10.25.1

    Share the place you are standing in

    • ·A Share button in the pause menu and in photo mode. On a phone it opens the share sheet; on a computer it copies the link. The link drops whoever opens it into the same place, in the same mode.
    • ·A shared link now shows a card for that place in chats and feeds: its photograph and its name, instead of the generic one.

  5. 2026-10-25 · v2026.10.25

    One email when a new place opens, asked for where you are

    • ·The email ask on the home page moved up from the very bottom to directly under the places, and there is a small one beside the loading screen and the pause menu, so there is something to do while a place loads.
    • ·Each one stays closed once you close it, and they all go away for good once you have signed up from any of them.

  6. 2026-10-20 · v2026.10.20

    Leaving a place no longer crashes, and the site reads as one

    • ·Leaving a place in the first fifteen seconds after it loaded threw an error in the background, on Android, iOS and desktop alike. The streamed town kept running after the page around it had gone. It now shuts down first, and its graphics memory goes with it.
    • ·Every inner page (pricing, research, achievements and the rest) now uses the same card as the home page, so the site stops reading as two websites.
    • ·Every email link on the site now fills in a subject that names the page you sent it from.

  7. 2026-10-16 · v2026.10.16.1

    A place that never finishes settling stops holding the loading screen up

    • ·If one file of a place kept failing to arrive, the loading screen could stay up forever. It now lifts after 25 seconds onto whatever has drawn, and the rest keeps streaming in behind it.
    • ·The "stuck" card that appears on a slow load now names the step that is actually stuck, not the one that just finished, and it no longer calls a slow but still arriving load dead.

  8. 2026-10-16 · v2026.10.16

    A demo of the ad manager, at admanager.wascape.com

    • ·A first look at advertising in Wascape: brands put an image or video ad on the measured walls and signs of the real places players walk, or sponsor a postcard, a film stock or a Market banner. It has its own band on the home page and a link in the menu.
    • ·It is a demo and says so. The advertiser, its campaigns and every number in it are made up, no ad runs in the game yet, and nothing is charged.

  9. 2026-10-15 · v2026.10.15

    A demo of the market, at market.wascape.com

    • ·A first look at the community market: postcards, stamps, film stocks and liveries from the places in the game, bought, sold and traded between players. It is linked from the menu on the home page.
    • ·It is a demo and says so on every page. The traders, items, prices and money are all made up, nothing you do there costs or pays anything, and sign-ups are not open yet. Pick one of the shared demo accounts on the login page to try buying, selling and trading.

  10. 2026-10-10 · v2026.10.10.1

    The front door opens on the mark building itself

    • ·The home page now opens on the logo assembling out of its own parts. Three Gaussian splats come in from outside the screen, one from each of three directions, and meet on a circle around the centre. They travel that circle together, a third of a turn apart, then the circle closes and they combine into the mark. The mark has always been the product drawn as its atom, since a captured place is nothing but thousands of those ellipsoids resolving into a picture, so the opening is that idea given a second to happen in.
    • ·They arrive in the instrument amber and settle to white as they lock up, which is the moment the three become one. The formed spark sits on the centre line, slides left, and the name wipes in beside it, letter by letter, into the lockup the site uses everywhere. Then the whole thing travels to the top-left corner and lands on the logo that was already sitting there.
    • ·It is not a gate in front of the website. It plays over the first photograph while that photograph is still arriving, and it hands over the moment the picture is ready, so on a normal visit it is not costing you a wait that was not already there. If the picture is slow it gets out of the way anyway inside two seconds, and a press anywhere skips it.
    • ·Every load of the home page, and only the home page. Refresh and you see it again. Moving between pages inside the site does not replay it, because nothing has reloaded there and a field dropping over a page you are already reading is not an opening.
    • ·The thing that takes it away is the stylesheet rather than any script, which matters more than it sounds: if the page fails to start its code, the opening still ends and the site is still there. Reduced-motion settings get a short fade instead of the choreography.

  11. 2026-10-09 · v2026.10.09.5

    In progress: what a learned model will do to the splats

    • ·Not in the game yet, and not a date. Nothing here uses a learned model today, which is why the home page says what AI will do rather than what it does.
    • ·Four places one would go. Pixels: the upsampler that rebuilds a full frame from a half-resolution one already ships with no network in it, measuring 34.3 decibels against the full picture where simply stretching the small one gets 32.0. A captured street is the easy case for this, because the place holds still and the camera is the only thing moving. DLSS 5 is the bar for a learned version.
    • ·Repair: captures arrive with floaters, holes, and splats hundreds of metres wide. Three of the eleven places here carried one up to 974 metres across until a size ceiling went in this week to stop them veiling the frame. Finding and dropping those before a place ships is the real fix; the ceiling is a bandage, and the eight captures that read sharp never produce a splat over 13 metres.
    • ·Light: a photograph carries the light it was taken in and no material to answer new light with, which is the shape of problem a model is likeliest to do better than a formula. And what was never captured: around a corner the scan never turned. That one has no date and will not be given one.
    • ·The transport stays deterministic on purpose. The wire format, the level selection and the sort win or lose by numbers that can be read off a bench, and a model in there would trade something debuggable for something that is not. The whole argument is written up in the devlog.

  12. 2026-10-09 · v2026.10.09.4

    Three places stop looking soft, and a place opens finished

    • ·Aix-en-Provence, La Filature and Perry Road read soft at every distance while the other eight places read sharp. It was not the streaming, it was not the quality budget and it was not your hardware. Those three captures contain a handful of Gaussians that are hundreds of metres wide. The largest in La Filature is 974 metres, in Aix 644, in Perry Road 270. Seen from inside a district six hundred metres across, one of those is a translucent sheet over the whole frame.
    • ·Which is why waiting never helped. A bigger budget buys more detail behind the sheet, and a longer loading screen only waits for the sheet to finish arriving. The eight places that look right top out between 2.8 and 12.8 metres, so the line between a capture that works and one that does not was never a close call. It took three days to find because every theory about loading was the wrong kind of theory.
    • ·Splats are now capped at 20 metres as they are staged for drawing, which is above anything the eight good captures contain and far below the outliers. The cap applies to each axis on its own, so a thin wall slab stays thin rather than being fattened into a block.
    • ·This is a repair in the renderer and not in the captures, which is worth saying plainly. The right fix is to drop those splats when a capture is processed, and nothing in that step looks at splat size yet, which is how three places came to ship this way. The cap covers every place including any added later, and it stays until the captures themselves are rebuilt.
    • ·Separately, a place now holds its loading screen until the picture is the one your machine is going to keep. It used to uncover at roughly a fifth of the way up, and the rest arrived in front of you over the following seconds, which reads as loading blurry and then fixing itself. The wait is a little longer and what you see when it ends is finished.

  13. 2026-10-09 · v2026.10.09.3

    The drone rises with the ground again

    • ·Let go of the height stick and the drone held the altitude it was left at, so flying up a hill meant the ground closing on it until a safety floor pinned it a third of a metre off the road for the rest of the climb. Fly down and it kept its altitude instead of coming down with the valley.
    • ·It follows the ground now. Releasing the stick keeps the CLEARANCE you left it at, up the hill and down it, which is what a camera flown over a place should do.
    • ·This was taken out in August for a good reason and the reason has not gone away: the drone used to measure the ground with a downward probe that reads whatever is highest beneath it, so every parked van, garden wall and balcony passing underneath read as the ground coming up and bought a climb. Flown down one modelled street that swung the drone nearly six metres off a six metre cruise.
    • ·What changed is which ground it reads. Every place already ships a second map of itself: the road surface, the one the car drives on. A parked van is not the road, so it is not in that map, and a height held against it cannot be fooled by one. The downward probe keeps its own job, which is noticing something genuinely close underneath and lifting off it.
    • ·Also fixed: the climb ceiling that was meant to follow the rooflines so a tower is reachable from the square beside it. It shipped five days ago and had never once run, because it was built for a way into flight mode that nothing in the game uses. Every flight since has been capped at a flat forty metres.

  14. 2026-10-09 · v2026.10.09.2

    There is a way back into full screen, and Escape works where it did not

    • ·Full screen could only be asked for once. The place asks on your first click, tap or keypress of a visit, and after that the only thing that could ask again was coming back from a pause that had taken it. Give the window back yourself and nothing would offer it again for the rest of the visit: not the switch in Settings, which only decides how the next place opens, and not the pause menu. F11 or a reload were the only ways back.
    • ·The pause menu has a full screen row now, and Settings under Display has a button that acts on the visit you are in rather than the next one. A click is the one thing a browser needs before it will fill the screen, so a button is the thing that was missing rather than a cleverer rule.
    • ·Escape could also go quiet on a browser that looked able to hand us the key and then did not. We asked for Escape, never checked whether the browser agreed, and assumed it had: so the browser spent your Escape leaving full screen, the key never reached the place, and the place declined to pause because it believed the key was on its way. Nothing happened, and the window did not come back either. We read the answer now instead of assuming it, and a browser that refuses falls back to the behaviour Firefox and Safari already had, where losing full screen is what pauses.

  15. 2026-10-09 · v2026.10.09

    One press of Escape pauses again, and there is a button for it

    • ·Pressing Escape in a full screen place needed two presses to bring the pause menu up: the browser spends the first one leaving full screen and the page only ever saw the second. That started the day before, when the place began filling the screen on a desktop at all. Before then no desktop was ever full screen, so Escape always arrived.
    • ·Escape belongs to the place now, where the browser allows it. One press pauses and the screen stays filled. A second press gives your window back, and a third is back to the place. Holding Escape still leaves full screen whatever we do, which is the browser keeping a promise we would not want to take away.
    • ·Chrome, Edge and Opera allow this. Firefox and Safari do not, so there the first Escape still takes full screen away, and losing it is what brings the pause menu up instead. One press either way, which was the point.
    • ·There is also a pause button now, bottom right, next to where the Escape hint has always appeared. It is there for the whole drive rather than the first four seconds, because a key you cannot see is not a control a visitor knows about.

  16. 2026-10-08 · v2026.10.08.4

    Pausing no longer costs you the full screen

    • ·Escape is how you pause here, and it is also how every browser leaves full screen. So the pause did both: you stepped away for a moment and came back to a window with tabs over the place, for the rest of the session, with no way to ask for it again.
    • ·Resuming asks for it back now. The page cannot stop the browser taking it, but coming back from the pause is something you did, and that is exactly what a browser needs before it will fill the screen again.
    • ·Only when the pause was what took it. If you left full screen yourself, with F11 or from the pause menu, resuming leaves your window alone. Quitting to the title does not go full screen either.
    • ·Opening Settings from the pause menu and coming back still counts as the same pause, however long you spend in there.

  17. 2026-10-08 · v2026.10.08.3

    The place fills the screen on a desktop too

    • ·On a phone the first tap has always taken the tab fullscreen, so the browser chrome gets out of the way before a place has finished loading. On a desktop it never did, and the capture opened inside a window framed by tabs and an address bar.
    • ·It asks on a desktop now, and it asks early enough to matter: pressing the way in from the front page is what grants it, so the place is already filling the screen while it loads rather than after. Landing somewhere by link instead, with no button pressed, the first click or keypress does it. A keypress counts because that arrival can go from the page opening to a hand on the keys without a click anywhere, and a browser grants fullscreen only off something the visitor did.
    • ·A browser that cannot run this still gets told so on the front page, in a window, and is never taken fullscreen on the way to being told.
    • ·There is a switch for it in Settings under Display, on by default. One thing worth knowing on a desktop: Escape is the pause key here, and every browser reads Escape as leaving fullscreen, so pausing that way puts the window back.

  18. 2026-10-08 · v2026.10.08.2

    The film opens on the capture instead of repeating the front door

    • ·On a desktop the second screen is a film of a capture resolving from a point cloud into a photograph. It used to open with the words “You were here. Now you’re there.” over a place picker, which is word for word the claim the screen above it makes and a second copy of the way in it already offers, one scroll earlier.
    • ·That was a leftover rather than a decision. The film used to BE the front page. The places became the front page last week and the film became the second beat, and its title card had already lost its masthead for exactly this reason; the headline and the picker were the rest of it.
    • ·It opens on a line about what that screen is actually doing instead: “This is a point cloud. Scroll, and it becomes the street.” The claim stays above it, the way in stays above it, and a desktop now gets one top-level heading on the page rather than two.
    • ·One thing taking the picker away broke, which was not obvious from the change: the headline never sat at the floor of that screen, the picker sat underneath and held it up. Measured against the live site, that was 230 to 274 pixels of clearance over the scroll marker at the bottom. Removing it dropped the type onto the marker, but only at some window sizes, because the marker is centred and the type is not, so it collided at 800 and 1024 and 1366 wide and looked perfectly fine at 1280 and above. A test checks the overlap at the three worst shapes now.

  19. 2026-10-08 · v2026.10.08.1

    The phone front page turns again, and stops fetching a page it is never shown

    • ·On a phone the front page turns through the places on its own, one every three seconds. It was not doing that for anyone whose phone asks for less motion, a setting iOS calls Reduce Motion and Android switches on with battery saver: the first place came up and nothing ever moved it.
    • ·Holding still was a reasonable reading of that preference while there were arrows to press, because a visitor still had a way to the other ten places. There are no arrows now, so it was leaving one place out of eleven and no way to the rest. It turns for everybody, and the preference is honored where it means something instead: the bar that fills while a place waits sits still rather than filling.
    • ·The arrows are gone. The photograph fills the screen and you swipe it, which it already did, and the two buttons were chrome laid over the picture doing a worse version of the same thing.
    • ·Separately, and this is what was costing real seconds: a phone was downloading all eleven photographs of the desktop front page, about 1.9 MB, for a page it is never shown. They arrived all at once, so the one photograph the phone did need next was queued behind ten it did not, and on a slow connection a place could sit there well past its three seconds. A phone resolves those to nothing now and pulls only what it will show, one at a time, in order. Measured with photographs arriving slower than the hold itself: a flat three seconds.
    • ·A photograph that fails to arrive no longer stops the page either. It used to wait for a load that was never coming and hold there for good, showing the last place’s picture under the new place’s name and its button. It steps past instead.

  20. 2026-10-05 · v2026.10.05.3

    In progress: splitting captured motion into trajectory and deformation

    • ·The work on captured motion has a method now rather than only a problem. A recorded clip of an object being knocked over is one fall, and in a game the same object can be hit from any side at any speed, so playing the recording back can only ever be right once.
    • ·So the recording gets split. The simulation already knows where an object goes, the arc and the bounce and the pose it settles into, and it responds to how the player actually hit it. What it cannot produce is how the surface behaves while that happens: the dent as metal takes a kick, a lid slapping and settling, light sliding across a scratched panel as it turns over. That second part is what the capture is asked for, in the frame of the object itself, so one recording covers a family of impacts instead of a single one.
    • ·The open risk is whether those two things come apart cleanly. If the denting depends on exactly where the contact was rather than on how hard it was, the split will read worse than either half alone. The devlog has the full method.
    • ·In progress. Nothing of this is live.

  21. 2026-10-05 · v2026.10.05.2

    In progress: streaming a place that changes, and 70 to 94 per cent of splats that need not be drawn

    • ·A visibility bake measured this week says that culling what the walls hide is worth 70 to 94 per cent of the splats drawn, on top of the culling that already happens for what is behind the camera. Median margins by place: Aix 93.7 per cent, Lourmarin 93.1, La Filature 85.8, La Sarraz 79.2, Ludlow 58.4. The map that carries it ships at 6 to 85 kB.
    • ·Ludlow scoring lowest is the method showing its limit honestly. It is divided into 102 regions, which makes each one large enough that part of it is visible from nearly anywhere, and anything partly visible has to be drawn. Dividing places more finely is the next thing to try.
    • ·The bake and its tests exist; the renderer is not yet reading them. These are numbers about what is available, not about the current frame rate.
    • ·Adding motion to a place makes three things harder at once: the single back-to-front order every splat scene is drawn in, what a second of captured motion costs to ship, and having a clip already in memory before a collision that gives no warning triggers it.
    • ·In progress.

  22. 2026-10-05 · v2026.10.05.1

    Band 0: what these captures record about light, and what they cannot

    • ·Four of the places here are published with no view-dependent colour at all. Checked rather than assumed: the file headers carry position, rotation, scale and a single colour, and none of the higher terms that describe how a surface changes as you move past it.
    • ·So on those four there is no wet-stone specular to recover, no glass, no sheen on foliage. That is a ceiling rather than a bug, and it is not one the renderer can lift, because no amount of detail returns information the source never recorded.
    • ·What remains worth spending effort on there is resolution, how many splats are shown, and the sky and exposure the place is lit against. Knowing which levers exist has saved more time than any of them have bought.
    • ·Going forward, whether a capture ships view-dependent colour is checked before a place is committed to rather than discovered later.

  23. 2026-10-05 · v2026.10.05

    In testing: the body no longer folds into itself in the first seconds of a walk

    • ·Walking straight after a place loaded could crush the character into itself for three or four seconds: the torso folded, the head sank into the shoulders, and then it came right on its own. Waiting ten seconds before walking avoided it entirely.
    • ·Four separate layers adjust the body after the animation has posed it, for the slope underfoot, the feet, the head and chest, and the arms. Each one has to tell its own last adjustment apart from a fresh pose underneath it, and each one does that correctly on its own. Two of them write the same bones, and each read the other as the animation, so their adjustments added up every frame instead of settling.
    • ·It only showed before the walking animation had finished downloading, because once it is playing it rewrites the whole body every frame and nothing can accumulate.
    • ·Fixed by giving all four layers a single shared idea of the pose underneath them. Measured as part of the fix: the distance from hips to head collapsed to less than half, and the head dropped 64 cm, within four seconds. A test now fails without the fix.
    • ·In testing. Not on the live site yet.

  24. 2026-10-04 · v2026.10.04.1

    In testing: the front page opens on the places, not on the film

    • ·The first screen is the places themselves now, turning: each capture named across it with the coordinate it was shot at. The point-cloud film that used to open the page is the second beat instead of the first.
    • ·The reason is simple enough. The film takes most of a page to make its argument, and it was making it before anyone had a reason to care. Somewhere you can go reads better as a front door than an explanation does.
    • ·The name and the menu sit on the picture and scroll away with it. There is no bar fixed across the top.
    • ·In testing. Not on the live site yet.

  25. 2026-10-04 · v2026.10.04

    In testing: walking stops freezing, and the drone flies lower

    • ·Walking could lock up: the body kept moving while the character stopped, usually after a jump or after pulling up onto something. Two separate faults, both fixed, both now covered by tests that fail without the fix.
    • ·The loading screen waits for the place to arrive rather than for a stopwatch. It used to uncover after a fixed count whether or not anything was still downloading, which on a slow connection meant being shown a fraction of the capture.
    • ·Switching tabs mid-load no longer leaves a half-loaded place behind. Nothing that measures time counts the seconds a tab spent in the background.
    • ·The drone hovers lower, and its ceiling follows the height of whatever is beside it rather than one number for the whole place. A cathedral is reachable from the square next to it now.
    • ·The on-screen control keys retire themselves after five seconds.
    • ·In testing. Not on the live site yet.

  26. 2026-10-03 · v2026.10.03.1

    In progress: 4D Gaussian splatting to replace authored animation

    • ·Everything that moves in a captured place today is animated the ordinary way: a modelled object, a rig, a curve somebody drew. Next to a scan that reads as exactly what it is. The street has real light and real imperfection in every splat, and the animated thing has neither.
    • ·The work now is replacing those moments with captured motion. 4D Gaussian splatting records an object across a stretch of time instead of at one instant, so a bin that gets kicked can fall the way a real bin fell rather than the way a curve said it should.
    • ·The first target is deliberately small and deliberately unforgiving. One object, one short clip, triggered by the physics that already runs underneath. If the playback is wrong on something that simple you can see it instantly, which is the whole reason to start there rather than on a crowd.
    • ·We are trying this and we have not solved it. The devlog carries the open problem: a captured clip is one fall, and a kicked bin can be kicked from any side. Nothing of this is live.

  27. 2026-10-03 · v2026.10.03

    In progress: Perry Road, Izu Shimoda. 45.7M splats, 6 LOD levels

    • ·A new place is being brought up. Perry Road is a canal street in Shimoda on the Izu peninsula, stone bridges on one side and timber merchant houses on the other, and it arrives at 45.7 million splats across six levels of detail.
    • ·It is the first place here outside Europe, and the first from this photographer.
    • ·The spot you would start from was picked twice. The first one passed every test the tools can run on their own: the colour of the ground said paving rather than grass, nothing sat overhead, the surface was flat to within twenty centimetres. Then the car drove three and a half metres and stopped, because those tests read a height map and the car hits walls.
    • ·So it was chosen again by driving the whole place in a physics simulation instead, every heading from every candidate. The spot that won runs twenty-nine metres of captured ground at forty-seven an hour, which is further than anywhere in Ludlow.
    • ·In progress. Hidden until it has been driven in a browser rather than in a simulation.

  28. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02.5

    Front-page film: lines enter and exit across the frame

    • ·Each line of the front-page film now enters from one edge of the screen and leaves by the other, alternating sides as you go down, instead of fading in where it stood.
    • ·The first screen has a scroll mark under it. Six screens of film and nothing on the first one said there was more below.

  29. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02.4

    Tuebingen and Lisbon bands baked as single images

    • ·The two photographic bands — Tübingen and Lisbon — are each a single baked image now, street and shadow in one file. The dark used to be a separate layer that stayed put while the photograph underneath it drifted, so it slid across the street as you scrolled.
    • ·Each town is named across its own band, large, instead of hidden behind it.
    • ·The bands are lighter than they were: Tübingen fell from 262 kB to 79, Lisbon from 156 to 55.

  30. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02.3

    Wordmark and brand on the desktop front page

    • ·The mark and the name lived only in the phone layout, so the desktop front door had been running without either.
    • ·The globe of places is half again as large. It is the one thing on that page you are meant to press, and it was drawn at the size of an illustration.

  31. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02.2

    Browsers without WebGL get the photographic front page

    • ·A machine that cannot start WebGL used to get six screens of captions over a canvas that never drew. It gets the photographic front page instead — the one built for phones, which needs no graphics card.
    • ·On the way there we found the phone layout resolving to a blank pixel on desktops, which is what that visitor would have seen.

  32. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02.1

    The scan holds its point-cloud form for longer

    • ·Colour used to be fully in by the halfway mark, which spent most of the walk on a colour photograph made of dots. It now lands on the line that names what you are looking at.
    • ·The beat labels came off. One line per screen does not need a table of contents above it.

  33. 2026-10-02 · v2026.10.02

    Front-page hand-off: a 367 ms worst frame cut to 117 ms

    • ·The walk through Ludlow ends by handing over to a photograph of the same spot, and that hand-off was the slowest thing on the site: 367 ms at its worst frame against 19 ms for the rest of the walk, with the whole crossfade crammed into about a hundred pixels of a four-and-a-half-thousand-pixel page.
    • ·It is now 117 ms at worst, and the fade plays over roughly forty frames instead of three.
    • ·The photograph also used to arrive about twenty pixels before the page stopped holding it, so the thing six screens of walking exists to reach was swallowed almost immediately. It now holds a full screen before the page moves on.

  34. 2026-10-01 · v2026.10.01.2

    In progress: shadows landing on a photograph

    • ·A captured place already has the light it was scanned under baked into every splat. Putting a car in it and having the car throw a shadow onto that means lighting something that was never lit — the scan has colour, not surfaces.
    • ·The sun is now a real direction the whole scene agrees on, and the splats take a shadow from it rather than only casting one. Next is taking the original light back out, so a place can be moved to another hour of the day.
    • ·In progress, on a branch. The goal is a scanned street that can be lit, not a scanned street with a dark patch painted under a car.

  35. 2026-10-01 · v2026.10.01.1

    In progress: a splat scene inside a splat scene

    • ·A captured town is one enormous object. Putting a second, small captured object inside it — a scanned bench, a scanned car, something you could knock over — means two splat scenes sharing one sort order, one depth buffer and one collision world.
    • ·Several collision strategies are being measured against each other for the small ones: a voxel shell, a convex hull, and a trimesh cut straight from the scan. The small object is the interesting case precisely because the cheap approximations that work for a whole town stop working at the scale of a chair.
    • ·In progress. Nobody is shipping scanned props you can hit, which is most of why it is worth doing.

  36. 2026-10-01 · v2026.10.01

    In testing: nine measured defects in character animation

    • ·A sweep over every animated figure in the places, measured rather than eyeballed: nine defects found and fixed, including statues that were quietly playing an idle loop and crowds walking in perfect lockstep because they all started on the same frame.
    • ·The walking speed the clips were authored at turned out to be a guess, and the run was out by about 65%, which is why feet skated. It is measured now, a jog was added between walk and run, and a test holds the numbers so the next clip cannot reintroduce the drift.
    • ·In testing: this is on a branch and the clips still have to reach the asset bucket before anyone would see it.

  37. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.8

    In testing: terrain-aware walker posture

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·On foot the character moved the same way wherever it was. The legs made a good walk and knew nothing about the ground under them, so on a stair the feet passed through the risers, and the climbing animation arrived about half a second after the stairs did, which is most of a stride.
    • ·It now looks at the ground it is about to reach rather than measuring the slope it has already climbed, so a flight of steps is met on time instead of being caught up with. Each foot finds the surface beneath it and stands on that, and the ankle rolls to match a slope.
    • ·It also looks where you are looking, breathes when it is standing still, leans into a turn, drops its gaze to a step before reaching it, and puts a hand out to the wall in a passage narrow enough to touch. Muggia is stone alleys climbing a hillside, so that is where most of this shows.
    • ·On a step too deep for the leg alone it now dips the hips to meet it, the way a person does, so the foot arrives on the tread instead of stopping short above it.
    • ·One thing it still does not do: reach for anything while running. That is deliberate for now, and everything here is waiting on a look in a browser.

  38. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.7

    In testing: the front page, rebuilt

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·The page was readable but it looked like everything else. Small text was all set the same way, so a footnote and the button you actually want shouted equally loudly; the ground sat close enough to the photographs that page and place blurred into one grey; and the closing line was a blue-violet gradient, which is the one thing that makes a page look generated.
    • ·The ground is darker now, so the captured place is the brightest thing on screen, which is the point. The menu lifts off the top edge into its own rounded panel. The panel you choose a place from sits inside a second one, the way a plate sits in a housing. The big amber button stopped glowing and moved its arrow into a well of its own, and it presses when you press it.
    • ·Everything on the page now moves on one curve instead of each part inventing its own.

  39. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.6

    In testing: earlier first paint on the front page

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·The scan of Ludlow on the front page is a 1.8 MB file, and nothing was drawn until all of it had arrived. It now draws as it downloads, so the place appears thin and fills in rather than making you wait on a black screen. On a slow connection the first points show up in about two seconds instead of nearly six.
    • ·For that to look like loading rather than breaking, the points had to be reordered: as captured they arrive one corner at a time, so the page would have lit a single corner and grown it sideways. Shuffled, any early slice is a sparse version of the whole town.
    • ·A desktop visit also stopped quietly downloading the phone version of the hero, which it never showed. That is half a megabyte nobody was using.

  40. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.5

    In testing: light, shadow, and per-arena detail

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·The current work is light. A capture arrives with the weather it was shot in baked into it, and the aim is to be able to move the sun, cast real shadows from what is actually there, and have the things you drive and walk sit in that light rather than float on top of it.
    • ·Alongside it, the smaller things that decide whether a place feels like a place: the arenas have edges now, so a car or a drone stops at them instead of leaving the world, and feet find the step they are standing on instead of passing through it.
    • ·None of this is on the live site yet. It is the thing being worked on rather than the thing being announced.

  41. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.4

    Wascape Studio, where every place is made

    • ·The demo shows the places. It does not show where they come from, so this is the short version.
    • ·Every place here started as a video or a scan and had to become something the engine can stream. That work happens in Wascape Studio, at studio.wascape.com, in a browser tab like everything else.
    • ·You bring a video, a set of photos, a 360, or a .ply you already have from Luma, Polycam or KIRI. You clean it with box, lasso, polygon, sphere and brush selections, pull out the floaters, mask what should not be there, frame it, and export the same formats the game streams.
    • ·It is the half of the loop the front page cannot demonstrate, and it is the reason the catalogue can grow.

  42. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.3

    In testing: foot IK on stairs

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·On a stair or a slope the legs made the right movement at the wrong height, so the feet passed through the risers and hovered over the treads. Each foot now finds the surface under it and stands on that, and the ankle rolls to match a slope instead of staying level. Muggia is stone alleys climbing a hillside, which is where it shows most.
    • ·On a deep step the leg still reaches short rather than dipping the hips to meet it. That half is written and waiting on a look in a browser.

  43. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.2

    In testing: the arena picker routes to the chosen place

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·Choosing another place from the explore page kept you in the one you were already in. The page asked for the new place and the scene never rebuilt, so it quietly showed you what was already on screen again. It changes properly now.
    • ·That page is the only way in to the places you can only walk, Muggia among them, so those were the ones it hid.

  44. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30.1

    In testing: car and walker lit from the capture

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·Eight of the ten places were photographed under a flat, overcast sky, and until now everything we draw into them was lit by a hard noon sun instead. That gave the car highlights the photograph does not have and a sharp shadow under a sky that casts none. Now each place lights what stands in it the way it was actually shot, and the two places that do have sun get their own sun, pointing where it really pointed.
    • ·In Ludlow and Olsztyn the light also follows where you are. Drive or walk into a lane between tall walls and you dim as the lane does, then come back up in the open.
    • ·This applies to the walker, the bicycle and the drone too, not only the car.

  45. 2026-09-30 · v2026.09.30

    In testing: arena bounds and out-of-bounds handling

    • ·Still in testing, not yet on the live site.
    • ·Every place stops you where the capture stops. Until now you could drive or walk straight past the last of it and keep going over blank ground under an empty sky, with nothing but a compass pointing back.
    • ·The edge follows the streets rather than drawing a circle around where you started, so a long street stays open to its far end while the empty ground beside it does not. In Aix that is the difference between three hundred metres of walkable route and half of it being closed off.
    • ·Flying has a ceiling as well, at the top of the capture.

  46. 2026-09-27 · v2026.09.27.1

    Reddit threads on the front page, and Wascape Studio in its place

    • ·Under the recorded drive, the Reddit threads where the demo was shared in r/threejs and r/SideProject, shown as the posts they are, with their upvotes and comments. Each opens on Reddit; nothing from Reddit loads until you click.
    • ·Wascape Studio, at studio.wascape.com, is the editor every place here goes through: bring a video, photos or a scan, clean it up, and export the formats the game streams, all in the browser. Its screenshots on the front page are smaller now and sit side by side.
    • ·Gstaad, the underground car park, is off the list for now.

  47. 2026-09-27 · v2026.09.27

    In testing: Muggia, a harbour town in Italy

    • ·A new place: the old town of Muggia, on the Italian coast by Trieste. Stone alleys climbing a hillside, walked end to end with a laser scanner by tosolini, who shared it under CC BY 4.0. It is the largest capture here so far.
    • ·You walk it or fly it. Its lanes and steps have no room for a car or a bicycle.

  48. 2026-09-24 · v2026.09.24.3

    In progress: our own format and renderer

    • ·Streaming a captured town has been built on somebody else’s file format and somebody else’s renderer, and both make assumptions that a place you walk through does not fit.
    • ·There is now a format, a runtime and a renderer of our own, running in the game behind a switch. It is the largest single bet in the project and the reason is simple: everything we want next — levels of detail that stream per cell, a sort that survives two scenes at once, lighting that reaches the splats — is blocked on owning the pipeline rather than renting it.
    • ·In progress, behind a flag. The benches that produced the numbers behind the decision are in the repository beside it.

  49. 2026-09-24 · v2026.09.24.2

    The streamed towns move to SHLS 0.3

    • ·The streamed places now deliver through the 0.3 revision of our chunk format, which asks for what the camera needs rather than what the file happens to offer next.
    • ·Its passes are timed on the GPU rather than guessed at, and the chunk pool stops refetching things it already holds.

  50. 2026-09-24 · v2026.09.24.1

    A survey of splat streaming across the field

    • ·Before committing to a format it was worth knowing what the field does. Seven write-ups of the current approaches to streaming Gaussian splats, measured against our own where a comparison was possible.
    • ·The short version: nobody is streaming a walkable capture at this size into a browser tab yet, which is both the opportunity and the reason there is no path to copy.

  51. 2026-09-24 · v2026.09.24

    In testing: the front page auto-advances, and four re-baked hero stills

    • ·On a phone the front page turns through the ten places on its own, and it no longer stops when you touch the screen. A scroll that only brushed it used to leave the page stuck on one place for good; now the arrows move it along instead of switching it off.
    • ·Four of the ten pictures were retaken from inside the capture. Aachen shows the cathedral instead of a brick terrace, Olsztyn an Old Town street instead of a shopfront with a cafe parasol smeared across it, and Lourmarin and Gstaad are far less smeared.
    • ·Gstaad is an underground car park and is still the weakest of the ten. It reads as a place now rather than a blur, but the capture behind it is thin and no camera angle fixes that.
    • ·If your phone is set to reduce motion, the front page stays still, as it did before.

  52. 2026-09-21 · v2026.09.21.2

    Two method papers, and a venue to submit them to

    • ·The streaming and relighting work is novel enough to be worth writing up properly, so it is being written up properly: a publication plan, a venue map, and papers that compile.
    • ·Two earlier drafts died during verification, which is the system working. A method that cannot be reproduced from its own description is not a method yet.

  53. 2026-09-21 · v2026.09.21.1

    Sub-pixel splats culled: long streets smoother, slow laptops recover faster

    • ·Faint, far-off splats that were too small to see are no longer drawn. Looking down a long street is about a sixth lighter on the graphics card in our tests, and the picture looks the same.
    • ·When a laptop turns out to be far too slow for a place, the detail now steps down in one go instead of over about twelve seconds of stutter.
    • ·Measured on a laptop so far, not yet on every phone. If a place still stutters for you, please say so on the contact page.

  54. 2026-09-21 · v2026.09.21

    A front page built for phones

    • ·On a phone the front page now opens like picking a stage in a game: the place fills the screen, you swipe or tap the arrows to go through all ten, choose walk, ride, fly or drive, and press start. A way in that a place does not have shows as locked.
    • ·The rest of the page is the same story set for a thumb, with bigger text and buttons, and it turns properly when the phone is held sideways. Once the first start button scrolls away, a smaller one stays at the bottom of the screen.

  55. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.4

    The SHLS spec and a reference client, published

    • ·Our chunk format is now a public document with a working reference client beside it, scrubbed of anything specific to our captures.
    • ·A format nobody else can read is a private file layout wearing a format’s clothes.

  56. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.3

    In testing: our lamp pass measured against the engine proxy lamps

    • ·Lighting a splat scene has two obvious routes: our own lamp pass, or the stock engine’s proxy-mesh relighting. Rather than argue about it, both were built and timed against each other on the same captures.
    • ·Ours wins at the light counts a street actually uses, and the measurement set the cap at eight lamps and the prepass budget at six milliseconds.
    • ·The depth pass was also writing NaN along the screen border, which quietly poisoned the normals of anything near the edge of the frame. Fixed, and the prepass now runs at half size and is upsampled, which is where most of its cost went.

  57. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.2

    In progress: relighting, aiming past DLSS 5, in a browser tab

    • ·Not in the game yet. It is the biggest thing being worked on, and the first pieces of it are the car entries below.
    • ·Every place here is a photograph, so it already has real light in it, but it cannot answer to light it never saw. The work is a lamp shone into a captured street that lights the real brick and throws a real shadow, and a sun that can be found in a capture and moved.
    • ·The bar is DLSS 5, which repaints a game frame to look photographed and needs one of the newest graphics cards to do it. We start from the photograph, and we are trying to go past that picture in a browser tab, on the machine you already have, with nothing to install.
    • ·As far as we can find, nobody has shown that yet. The details stay close until there are pictures to put next to the photograph.

  58. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20.1

    In progress: 4D Gaussian splatting for places that move

    • ·Not in the game yet, and not a date.
    • ·Every place here is one instant: still air, fixed light, and anyone who walked through the shot smeared or gone. 4D Gaussian splatting is the same kind of capture with time in it, a place as it was over a stretch of time instead of a single moment.
    • ·That is where leaves in the wind, moving water, cloud shadows crossing a square and a sun that travels have to come from. Drawn on top of a photograph they would be effects; captured, they are the place.
    • ·It is being built together with the relighting, since a moving sun needs a street that can take new light. The first step works: a photographed splat can change its light on every frame in the browser. Making it move on every frame is the next thing to measure.

  59. 2026-09-20 · v2026.09.20

    Phones are in: drive, walk, ride and fly on touch

    • ·The phone work below is live. A phone with WebGPU, which means Chrome on Android 12 or later or Safari on iOS 26, opens straight into the place.
    • ·Driving, walking, the bicycle and the drone each have touch controls drawn on screen and sized for a thumb. Pause is a round button at the top, every load has a way back out, and a phone without the graphics hardware gets a page saying why.
    • ·Still in testing: telling phones that have the browser but not the hardware, before they overheat. That goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Older phones are still being measured one at a time. If it runs badly on yours, please say so on the contact page.

  60. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.11

    In testing: phones without WebGPU are told so instead of overheating

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Some phones have a browser that can run this but not the hardware for it: the town came out magenta, the phone got hot, and the tab crashed or froze. Those phones now get a clear page saying the device cannot run it yet, before anything loads.
    • ·Phones with less than 4 GB of memory are stopped straight away. Any device that struggles once, with a frame rate stuck under five frames a second, a graphics chip that gives up, or a tab that crashes, is stopped at once and remembered, so it is not put through it again.
    • ·There is a "try anyway" link for anyone who wants to risk it. If it then plays without trouble, the device is let back in for good.

  61. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.10

    In testing: the car takes arena shade in Olsztyn

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Olsztyn was photographed on a sunny day, and the car stayed in full sun even under the trees and in the shadow of the buildings. It now takes the shade where the photograph has shade, and comes back into the sun where the street does.
    • ·Only Olsztyn so far. The shade is where it was on the day of the photograph, and the car is in it or out of it as a whole.

  62. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.9

    In testing: no pose snap on the first walk

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·The first time you walked after a place loaded, the arms and legs could snap into a stiff pose for a moment. The walking animations arrived just after the loading screen lifted, and switching over to them showed the bare skeleton for a frame. They now load behind the loading screen.

  63. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.8

    Quieter car audio, and no cards on a phone

    • ·The car is quieter: the engine and the tyres are half as loud. The engine slider in Settings still works on top of that.
    • ·The car used to appear half a metre above the road and drop onto it, bouncing for two seconds. It now appears already resting on the road.
    • ·On a phone the welcome card and the controls cards no longer pop up. The controls are drawn on screen, and CONTROLS in the pause screen still shows them.

  64. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.7

    In testing: car dimming under trees and in narrow lanes

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·The car took the same light everywhere in a town, so under a tree or between tall walls it shone as brightly as in the open square. In Ludlow it now takes the light of the spot it stands on, and dims where the street around it is dim.
    • ·Only Ludlow has this so far. The car takes one light at a time, so a car half under a tree is lit as if it were all under it.

  65. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.6

    In testing: the car lit by the arena light

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every place lit the car with the same bright midday sun, though most of them were photographed on a grey day. In those the car now takes the soft light of the photograph: no hard highlights, and its sides lit by the sky instead of going dark. A white car now reads about as bright as the white window frames around it.
    • ·The car also sits on the road now, with a soft shadow underneath it where it blocks the sky. The places photographed in sunshine keep a sun, now aimed where the sun in the photograph was and as strong and as warm as it was there, with the sky lighting the side turned away from it.

  66. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.5

    The car is loaded before the cover lifts

    • ·Opening a place in the car, the car only started loading once the loading screen had gone, so for a moment you saw a red block where the car should be. The car now loads behind the loading screen, and the screen lifts with you already in it.
    • ·Switching to the car later, the red block no longer shows while the car loads. The car appears when it is ready.

  67. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.4

    In testing: camera collision keeps it out of walls

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·In a narrow street the camera behind the car could end up inside a building, and the whole screen went to a blur of wall. It now moves in toward the car when a wall is in the way, and lifts a little when that is not enough, so the car stays in view. It never rises above the rooftops, which were never photographed.
    • ·Leaves, signs and walls right against the camera used to smear across the picture. They now fade out as the camera gets close. Where the camera is still caught behind a wall you may see a dark gap there instead of a blur.

  68. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.3

    Fewer stutters after a town loads, and no jump on first touch

    • ·On a phone the picture kept stepping up its detail in the first seconds after a town appeared, and every step stuttered while you were moving. The extra detail now arrives when you pause, so the stutter lands on a still frame. If the phone is struggling, detail still drops at once.
    • ·The first touch took the page full screen while a thumb could still be on a stick, and the stick jumped. Full screen now waits until every finger is off the glass, and if the screen changes shape under a held stick anyway, the stick lets go instead of jumping.
    • ·Frames came late while a thumb was moving a control, a small judder only when steering. They land on time now. Climbing or descending the drone no longer counts as standing still, which used to halve the frame rate.
    • ·The drone camera stops turning the moment you let go of its stick, rather than drifting on a few degrees.

  69. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.2

    New drone controls on touch

    • ·The drone used a radio controller layout, and turning was hidden on the sides of the left stick. It now flies like a game: the left stick moves you forward, back and sideways, and the right stick is the camera. Hold it left or right to keep turning, up or down to tilt.
    • ·UP and DOWN sit beside the right stick; hold them to climb and descend. You can still drag the empty screen to look around, as on foot.
    • ·A sideways push on the camera stick only turns, so a slow pan does not drift up into the sky. Each stick is labelled with what it does.
    • ·The sticks sat partly over the bottom bar, so a thumb landing low on the left one could switch you into the car. They sit above it now.

  70. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19.1

    In testing: the lower picture presets are no longer soft

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every picture setting below the highest drew the world bigger than the frame it was drawing into and then shrank it to fit, which is why Balanced and Performance looked softer than they should have. They draw at the right size now: a much sharper picture at the same speed.

  71. 2026-09-19 · v2026.09.19

    Walk auto-run release, and a stable picture aspect

    • ·The mark that keeps you walking hands-free sat just past the edge of the stick, and a thumb pushing hard to run goes just past the edge, so a run you let go of could keep walking. It sits further out now, only switches on once you have rested a thumb on it, reads STOP while it is on, and a tap stops you.
    • ·The camera swings gently round behind you as you walk, so pushing the stick sideways turns you instead of walking you across the screen. It waits while you are dragging to look around.
    • ·On some phones the whole picture came out stretched sideways. The game now re-measures the screen whenever a phone rotates, goes full screen or hides its address bar.
    • ·The pause screen on a phone is a square card in the middle, resume on top, rather than a wide strip across it.
    • ·On the bicycle, the steering arc now turns you all the way round: U-turns and circles without dragging the view, with the camera following behind. It used to steer toward wherever the camera pointed, which on a phone only moves when you drag it.

  72. 2026-09-18 · v2026.09.18.3

    In progress: removing the baked-in sun from a capture

    • ·A scan arrives with the light it was captured under baked into every splat — the shadows are painted on. You cannot move the sun in a place like that, because there is no sun to move.
    • ·There are now tools that find the sun a capture was taken under, take it out, and put a different one in. That is the whole difference between a photograph of a place and a place.
    • ·In progress and offline for now: it runs over a capture before it ships, not in the browser.

  73. 2026-09-18 · v2026.09.18.2

    In testing: a render pass library, and light landing on splats

    • ·The rendering experiments had been accumulating as one-off branches. They are a library of composable passes now, which is what makes it possible to ask whether two of them are better together than apart.
    • ·Light in the air — the visible shafts and haze a street has at dusk — is in it, tuned to the hour, and the march that draws it runs at half resolution with a test proving that it is not noisier for it.
    • ·The walker is drawn solid, so its head, hands and legs stop disappearing against bright frontage.

  74. 2026-09-18 · v2026.09.18

    One-thumb walking on a phone

    • ·Walking used the car’s controls: a speed lever and a steering arc, two thumbs, no way to step sideways. It has a stick of its own now in the bottom-left. Push it the way you want to go and you walk that way relative to the camera, and the body turns to face its path. The rest of the screen is for looking around.
    • ·Two paces and nothing in between: inside the ring you walk, at its edge you run. A stick pushed partway used to ask for a shuffle too slow for the animation to match, so the feet slid.
    • ·Slide the stick up past the ring onto the lock mark and you keep walking while you look around. A tap cannot set it, which matters: a stray tap used to send the walker off across town.
    • ·Parts of the walker could vanish, leaving a torso with no head or legs. It is drawn solid now and fades with a fine dither when the camera closes in.

  75. 2026-09-17 · v2026.09.17

    The ten captures become a turnable globe

    • ·The ten captures used to be a flat sheet of pictures. They are dots on a world you can turn by hand now, each one at its real coordinate, with every place named in a list beside it so nothing waits for a cursor to find it.
    • ·The point is the coordinate. These are real towns in real countries, and a map is the one layout that says so without a sentence.

  76. 2026-09-15 · v2026.09.15

    Phone load failures recover, and are counted

    • ·A slow connection could end a load on an error that never cleared, while the download was still arriving. Bytes arriving now count as progress, time in another app no longer counts against the load, and the card takes itself down the moment the place is ready.
    • ·Some phones offer the graphics interface this needs with nothing behind it. Walking took that at its word and failed with engine jargon; it now asks for the hardware first, as driving always has, and a phone that cannot run it gets the page explaining why. That page no longer appears sideways, and it now names Safari 26 and iOS 26 rather than iOS 18.
    • ·Walking pauses when you leave the tab, as driving does, and sound stops with it. On an iPhone, sound cut off by a call comes back.
    • ·A phone downloads a fifth of the ground it used to before a town appears: four to five megabytes instead of twenty-two, within a few centimetres of every step and kerb.
    • ·Loads that stall or fail, phones that drop the graphics, and tabs the phone closes for memory each leave one event now, under the same opt-out in Settings as everything else. Until now they were invisible.

  77. 2026-09-11 · v2026.09.11.1

    Pointer capture leak: the controls stopped answering

    • ·The controls would stop working after five or ten minutes on a phone. A browser can take a gesture away from the page mid-drag for its own back-swipe or a system panel, and it does not always say so, leaving the steering arc following a finger that had gone. Every touch after that looked like a second finger arriving, so it ignored them all. The brake and boost buttons had the same hole, where a stuck button keeps braking with nothing on screen to release.
    • ·There was no way back out of a load on a phone. Both driving and walking now have a back button at the top left that a thumb can hit.
    • ·A phone asks for a quarter of the memory it used to when a place opens, sized to what the place actually needs rather than one number for all of them, and climbs if your phone proves it can hold more.

  78. 2026-09-11 · v2026.09.11

    In progress: what a phone really costs, and light that behaves

    • ·Nothing here has shipped. It is being worked on alongside the demo and it is better to say so than to go quiet.
    • ·The numbers a phone runs on were argued rather than measured, and they are being measured now. The pause screen on a phone prints frame rate, scene size and drawing resolution so they can come off a real device instead of a desk.
    • ·A captured place is a photograph, so it already contains real light. What it does not contain is any reaction to what we put into it: the car casts no shadow on the street and does not reflect the road. The first of those now works behind a switch and is being tested.
    • ·Rendering fewer pixels and rebuilding the full picture from several frames of them is also being tried, which is the technique behind the upscaling in modern games. Whether it buys frames on a phone is the one number that has to come off a real device.

  79. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10.3

    In testing: splats receiving a cast shadow

    • ·Things standing in a captured place could cast a shadow, but the place could not receive one — so a car threw a shadow onto nothing and sat in the street like a sticker.
    • ·The splats take the sun’s shadow now. Alongside it, a temporal upsampler that renders fewer pixels and reuses the last frame for the rest. Both behind their own flags while the look is judged.

  80. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10.2

    Directional light axis corrected to -Y, not -Z

    • ·A directional light in the engine shines along its own -Y axis, not its -Z. Every sun in the project had been aimed as though it were -Z, so what was set as noon arrived nearly horizontal.
    • ·Months of judging how light looked on a capture were made against a sun in the wrong place. It is aimed correctly now, and every place was re-checked against it.

  81. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10.1

    Phone controls no longer overlap

    • ·Pausing was a settings cog nineteen pixels wide, in the corner where a phone keeps its own back and home gestures. There is now a round pause button on the top edge, in the middle, and the card it opens leads with a large resume.
    • ·The words that switch between driving, walking, riding and flying were twenty-six pixels tall against a floor of forty-four. Every one of them is a proper target now.
    • ·Letting go of the steering used to snap the wheel to centre in a single frame, which reads as the control switching off. It unwinds over about a fifth of a second now, and the throttle glides to its stop when you brake. The brake still cuts the engine the same instant.
    • ·A tap on its own now sets nothing. The throttle read a touch anywhere along it as a position, so on foot one brush of the screen edge sent you walking with no obvious way to stop.
    • ·Nothing on the phone screen sits on anything else. The messages that used to stack up over the controls are one band now, in the part of the screen no control wants, holding one thing at a time.

  82. 2026-09-10 · v2026.09.10

    In testing: black boxes in the streamed towns

    • ·The corrected data is already in the asset bucket and every deployment reads it, so this is live wherever the edge cache has turned over. Marked in testing because it has not been confirmed on the machine that reported it.
    • ·A day after detail was allowed to step back for frame rate, black patches appeared in the streamed towns. Each town is cut into thousands of cells kept at several levels of detail, and at the sparse edges of a capture some cells had nothing at the coarsest levels, so the renderer drew nothing at all. It never showed while detail was pinned high.
    • ·The fix is in the data rather than the page: those cells now carry an entry at every level. A few hundred more splats per town at the lowest detail, out of hundreds of thousands, and a test now fails if any cell ever lacks a level again.

  83. 2026-09-08 · v2026.09.08

    In testing: open at full detail, then hold a frame rate

    • ·Still in testing. It goes out with the next deploy.
    • ·Every place opened at the most detail your machine is trusted with, and nothing was allowed to answer if that turned out to be too much. On the bigger captures it often was, giving a sharp town at a frame rate that felt heavy to move through.
    • ·Detail now steps back when the frame rate falls under 25, aiming for 30, and comes back on its own once it recovers. Between 25 and 32 it does nothing, which is the part that took the work: the previous version chased two or three frames nobody was missing and always ended at a soft town.
    • ·It no longer watches the loading, which is a judgement on your connection rather than your machine. The switch is still in Settings under frame rate vs detail.

  84. 2026-09-06 · v2026.09.06

    Capture attribution for every place

    • ·Every place in the catalogue is somebody’s scan, and several are other people’s work under open licences. There is a credits page naming each capture, its author and its licence.
    • ·A platform built on other people’s captures that does not name them is not a platform, it is a scrape.

  85. 2026-09-04 · v2026.09.04.1

    Look-around yaw sign corrected on foot

    • ·Every way of looking around on foot turned the wrong way: the mouse, a finger, the right stick on a controller and the steering arc on a phone, each doing the same sum with the same sign wrong. They share one piece of maths now.
    • ·It had been that way a while. In a car you steer rather than look, and the chase camera puts the view back behind you every frame, so nothing surfaced it until the village captures started opening on foot.

  86. 2026-09-04 · v2026.09.04

    A faster front page, and self-describing product pages

    • ·The photograph the front-page cloud resolves into is also where those points get their colour, so nothing painted until it had arrived. It now ships at 227 kB instead of 532, the same frame at the same size, and downloads alongside the code instead of queueing behind it.
    • ·The drive and explore pages carried almost no text in the file the server actually sends, so anything reading a page without a graphics card was handed an empty shell. Both now carry a heading, a description and real links to the real places. It is not drawn on screen, but it is in the page and in the accessibility tree, which gives a screen reader a landmark on what is otherwise a bare canvas.

  87. 2026-09-03 · v2026.09.03

    The phone console, and a phone budget

    • ·Pause, settings, the map and the controls card were laid out for a laptop and mostly off the screen on a phone. Each has a short-screen version now: pause is one card, settings puts its categories in a strip along the top, the map is a small plate you tap to open, and the controls clear themselves after twelve seconds.
    • ·A handheld draws thirty frames a second, and fifteen when nothing is moving, while physics, input and the readouts keep running every tick. The controls stay as responsive; the part that drains a battery does not run flat out.
    • ·Two things that had never worked by touch now do: the car on the explore pages took keyboard only, and the Gstaad aeroplane had no touch path at all. Wiring both through the same deck also handed the explore car a game controller.

  88. 2026-09-02 · v2026.09.02.1

    Phones gated on capability, not on user-agent

    • ·A phone used to be turned away on its user-agent string, before anything asked what it could do. Phones now take the same capability test as every other device and land in the same engine, or on the same compatibility page if they fail it.
    • ·The car, the bicycle and walking share one set of touch controls, drawn on screen the whole time: a speed lever up the left edge that holds where you leave it, a steering arc up the right, and four word buttons that say what they do rather than being a glyph to learn. On foot two of them become run and jump.
    • ·Steering is proportional. The on-screen controls could only press the same left and right keys a keyboard sends, so a phone got full lock or nothing while a game controller got a real axis.
    • ·The aeroplane and the drones get a radio transmitter instead: two sticks laid out the way a drone pilot already holds one.
    • ·Add ?touch=1 to a drive or explore address and the touch controls appear in a desktop browser, worked with the mouse. That is how they were designed and the quickest way to see them without a phone.

  89. 2026-09-02 · v2026.09.02

    Ludlow drives on a baked ground surface, not a flat plane

    • ·Ludlow, the place most people drive, had been driving on a flat plane laid under the whole town rather than on the town itself, since the ninth of August. Within forty-five metres of where the car appears, 94% of the scanned ground stands above that plane by about a metre: the road climbed the hill and the car did not. It has a baked ground of its own now, and on a simulated lap the sustained roughness falls from 1.01 g to 0.31.
    • ·That also withdraws something said here last week. Ludlow was called the worst-driving capture in the set on the strength of a measurement that was real and was measuring the plane, not the town.
    • ·On eight of the ten places the car started underneath the road, because a car is built the instant a place opens and the ground it stands on has to arrive. Gravity is now held off it until its ground lands. All ten places rest within three centimetres of the road you can see; before this, eight sat between 0.67 and 6.54 m under it.
    • ·Lourmarin, Aix, La Sarraz and La Filature lead with walking now. They are village lanes and the longest straight in one of them is about sixteen metres. Nothing is taken away: all four still drive.
    • ·The theme plays over the loading screen on a cold open. A browser holds sound frozen until the page has been touched, so music scheduled before your first key press was not quiet, it was waiting.

  90. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.5

    Theme music scheduled during the loading screen

    • ·The theme is meant to score the wait and then step back. It was doing neither: nothing was scheduled until a file request came back, and on a loading screen that request queues behind the place itself, so the music turned up as the place did and then faded out on cue. It starts when the screen appears now.
    • ·It is also about nine decibels louder. The theme lost that much level when it was rewritten for solo piano, and the tool used to compare arrangements matches their loudness before playing them, which is precisely how you stop hearing a loudness problem. There is a separate check now that measures what reaches the speakers.
    • ·A deployed build was also refusing to use recorded audio anywhere it existed, having read an index built where the recordings are not kept and concluded there were none.

  91. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.4

    In progress: touch support, and 4D capture

    • ·Nothing here has shipped. Two things are being worked on alongside the demo and it is better to say what they are than to go quiet.
    • ·Phones. A phone meets a compatibility wall today rather than a place. The browser support that wall waits on is arriving on its own, so the work is on the other side of it: what a captured place actually costs on a phone, tested across a spread of devices rather than one flagship.
    • ·Captures that move. Everything drivable here is one frozen moment: still air, fixed light, and anything that moved during the capture smeared or gone. Capture that changes over time is being tried, separately from the demo. It is early, and it is not a date.

  92. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.3

    Loading cover lifts after the detail rung lands, not before

    • ·A place used to appear soft and sharpen in front of you. That was the loading screen lifting the moment anything at all was drawable, which is always the lowest-detail version. It waits for the detail your machine is going to run at now, so the first frame you see is the one you keep.
    • ·Nothing about how much is loaded has changed. The wait is a little longer and it is capped, so a stalled download uncovers the place rather than stranding you.
    • ·Settings, Display has a switch for the other half: whether the frame rate may lower quality once you are in. It is off, which is what it has quietly been for a while.

  93. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.2

    Drone model: camera, aerial, battery and wiring restored

    • ·The quad was missing its camera, aerial, battery and wiring. They were in the original model all along, in a second group left behind when the file was cut down for the download.
    • ·Its propellers turned about a point a good way off their motors, so they swung rather than spun. Each turns about its own axis now, a tenth of a millimetre from the shaft it sits on.

  94. 2026-08-31 · v2026.08.31.1

    Audio for the walk, ride and flight movers

    • ·Walking, riding and flying make noise now. They always had voices; getting out of the car was silencing the whole page, so the only way back was to pause and unpause, which also restarted the engine of the car you had just left.
    • ·The theme scores the loading screen and then steps out of the way, fading over five seconds and leaving the street to it. The title screen keeps it.

  95. 2026-08-30 · v2026.08.30.1

    Acro flight mode: the sticks rotate the airframe

    • ·The Gstaad car park has a second way to fly it. The sticks turn the aircraft rather than steer it, nothing levels itself, and letting go while upside down does what letting go while upside down does. Press F to switch. It is offered there and nowhere else, because a car park with pillars is somewhere to practise and a street is not.
    • ·The camera drone sits at head height and stays there. It used to climb on its own, sometimes several metres, with nobody touching anything.
    • ·The chase camera sits closer behind the car and the drone; near the edge of a place the old one could end up outside the scan looking back in. The driver view lost a dark smear above the dashboard, which was a shadow landing in the wrong place.

  96. 2026-08-30 · v2026.08.30

    A single piano theme across every arena

    • ·There is one theme now and it is the same one in every town. The version before gave each place its own phrase worked out from its coordinates, which was a good story and could never have done the job: you know a game from four notes because they are the same four notes every time. Per-place identity moved into the key instead, so each town transposes and still sounds like itself.
    • ·It is played on a piano, and it moves. The background used to hum, which was not a matter of taste: chords were held at a constant level for three and a half seconds at a time, which the ear reads as a key held down rather than as harmony. Every note is struck and decays now.
    • ·The title screen had been playing it all along, about fifteen decibels below the point where anyone would notice. The number holding it down was written months earlier for a soft pad whose whole job was staying out of the way.
    • ·None of it is a download. The music is a few kilobytes of instructions for building the sound in the browser.

  97. 2026-08-29 · v2026.08.29

    Per-arena latitude and longitude in the HUD

    • ·The numbers at the top of the screen, the ones that say this is a real street and not a set, are now also the tune. Ludlow is 52.3680 north, 2.7202 west, and those digits pick the notes. The rhythm and the first and last notes are the same everywhere, so all of them are recognisably one piece.
    • ·There had been no music in any town at all. The system was wired into the mixer and onto the volume slider and played nothing, because it could only play recordings and there were none. Every other sound here is built from oscillators with recordings as an optional upgrade; music was the only part that was not, which is how it went missing without anything noticing.
    • ·The music follows what you are doing: a slow chord parked, a pulse under it driving, an octave opening at speed in the one gap the engine leaves.
    • ·Walking, riding and flying get the instrument panel the car has, reading speed against what that particular mover can do, in km/h rather than two units for the same thing. The slot where the car prints its gear holds your gait on foot, your cadence on the bike, and your height above whatever is under you in the drone.

  98. 2026-08-28 · v2026.08.28

    HUD map mirroring fixed, wall climbing, and a ground bake under the car

    • ·The map was a mirror, drawing each place with left and right swapped, so it turned you the wrong way at every junction. Both maps are the right way round now.
    • ·Drive, walk, ride and fly are one place instead of four loads of the same place. Switching used to fetch the whole town again, for a town already on your screen.
    • ·The car has a proper road under it. In most places it had been resting on whatever stood highest in each square, which in a town is roofs, trees and the tops of parked vans. Nine places got a ground surface of their own, and three had a safety floor sitting above their own street.
    • ·Walk into something between knee and chest height, press jump, and you climb it. Above about chest height it stays a wall, because a capture has nothing in it to grab. Landing is animated now, and X ducks.
    • ·Every way of moving has more than one camera; press C to cycle. Eye level is the one to try first, because these are photographs taken at eye level and until now there was no way to look at one from there.

  99. 2026-08-27 · v2026.08.27

    Seven more captures drivable, and arena picking on touch

    • ·Seven more captures join the squares, so every place on the index can be driven as well as walked. Two months ago the note against the French captures said they were stepped lanes a car had no business in. That was true of the corner each one starts you in, and not true of the capture.
    • ·Each got its own starting point for the car. Flat ground alone picks the lawn, so every candidate was read for colour as well: the best-driving spot in La Sarraz ran forty metres across the chateau grass.
    • ·Three places were being driven on an invisible floor set above the road, level and smooth and never touching the street you could see beneath it.
    • ·The Gstaad car park is the one place you can drive but not walk: a sealed deck with a ramp and no way in on foot.

  100. 2026-08-25 · v2026.08.25

    Aachen Domplatz and Tuebingen Marktplatz made drivable

    • ·Aachen Domplatz and Tübingen Marktplatz are drivable, which makes three places you can drive rather than one. Both are open paved squares, which is the shape a car works in; the other captures are stepped medieval lanes and stay on foot.
    • ·Each has its own place for the car to start, separate from where a walker starts. A walker is put where the view is; a car needs flat paving under two metres of body and a clear run in front of it.

  101. 2026-08-24 · v2026.08.24

    Walls, ground and sky for the three new towns

    • ·The three new towns have walls for the car, so driving them meets the same walls walking does. Every capture keeps its own sky, held at the exposure the scene was measured at.
    • ·On a phone the map of Europe is a picture and the list underneath is the control. Panning a map with a thumb while trying to scroll the page is a fight nobody wins.
    • ·Controllers work, on the driving demo and in the towns, plus a layout for model transmitters plugged in as a joystick.

  102. 2026-08-23 · v2026.08.23

    Aachen, Olsztyn, Tuebingen, Lisbon and Gstaad added, with a HUD map

    • ·Aachen, Olsztyn, Tübingen, Lisbon, and an underground car park in Gstaad. The car park is the first place here that offers one way through it and not four: no daylight, no route in on foot, so it is flown or it is not visited.
    • ·The places band is a map of Europe, each capture on its own coordinates instead of in a row, which answers where is this better than a caption does.
    • ·Pause stops the world. It used to stop the controls and leave everything else running behind the menu, which is why a paused tab kept the fans up.

  103. 2026-08-22 · v2026.08.22

    View-dependent LOD: detail spent on what is in frame

    • ·The towns hold the same amount of detail and spend it on what is in front of you, instead of spreading it evenly across a district you are mostly not looking at. In the same street in Aix, the cobbles, the kerb line and the bollards are legible where they used to be a smear.
    • ·That costs frames on a laptop graphics chip, and it is worth naming rather than burying: about 11 a second against 46 on the old path. Performance and Balanced in Settings buy them back. The trade is deliberate, because this is a photography problem before it is a frame rate problem.
    • ·Ludlow Square keeps loading whole, which on that capture is both sharper and faster: it is a small courtyard where everything sits at roughly the same distance, so there is no near and far to tell apart.

  104. 2026-08-20 · v2026.08.20

    The landing reveal routes into an arena picker

    • ·The home page had a reveal and no way in. The scan of Ludlow resolving into the photograph runs for nearly three screens of scrolling, and for that whole stretch there was nothing you could press. There is a door in the hero now, and it stays lit for the whole reveal.
    • ·Choosing a place and choosing how to move through it used to be two sections that did not cross. They are one now, and every place shows the ways it actually offers: the square shows four and the towns show three. That one missing button is the honest way to say a car cannot get down a stepped medieval lane.
    • ·The page also stopped leading with driving, on a site where four of the five places are walked.

  105. 2026-08-15 · v2026.08.15

    Boot at the sharpest rung, with frame rate as the fallback signal

    • ·Every machine is offered the sharpest version of a capture first, and the frame rate is what argues it down, rather than a guess about your class of hardware ruling it out before it is tried.
    • ·Stepping down needs evidence, not a slow first minute. A capture takes real seconds to arrive on any machine, and the picture used to be judged, and demoted, while it was still arriving.
    • ·If a machine really cannot hold what it was offered, the next visit opens one level lower. That note expires after a month, because a bad afternoon is not a permanent verdict about your computer.

  106. 2026-08-14 · v2026.08.14

    Streamed towns open at target detail instead of climbing to it

    • ·Walking into a town used to start on the lowest detail and work upward, one step every six seconds, under a ceiling that stopped short of the sharpest file we ship. Most visits never got there. The scene opens at the top now, and the frame rate can only take detail away.
    • ·The first frame arrives sooner, not later: a light version lands first, the cover comes down on that, and the sharp one takes over in place while you are already walking.
    • ·On laptop graphics chips the towns also stopped rendering below the resolution of the screen they are on, which is a softness no amount of detail can undo.

  107. 2026-08-11 · v2026.08.11

    Aix and Lourmarin: near-fade arithmetic corrected

    • ·Two of the four towns rendered as a soft blur no matter what you did, and the reason was arithmetic rather than taste: almost the whole detail budget went on holding the outline of a district, leaving nothing for the street under your feet. No capture can be starved that way again.
    • ·Detail climbs now as well as falls. A machine running comfortably above target had no way to spend the headroom. Measured on an Intel laptop chip, Aix settled at three times the detail it used to, at the same frame rate.
    • ·CINEMATIC in Settings, Display means what it says on the towns: the most detail your hardware is trusted with, held there. The only thing it can cost you is smoothness.

  108. 2026-08-10 · v2026.08.10

    Streamed towns render at the native device pixel ratio

    • ·The streamed towns were drawing fewer pixels than your screen has and letting the browser stretch the result. They render at the density your machine is rated for now.
    • ·The quality preset in Settings does something here. It was wired only to the post-process chain, and these towns deliberately run none of that, so picking a higher setting changed nothing at all.
    • ·Towns start faster, and the loading screen stays up until there is something finished to walk into. Three things used to still be arriving after it lifted, and you could watch all of them: the town assembling around you, the ground appearing underfoot, and your own body turning up a moment later.
    • ·Breaking into a run is a wind-up now rather than a switch, building over about four strides.

  109. 2026-08-09 · v2026.08.09

    A bicycle mover with lean dynamics, not a two-wheeled car

    • ·The bicycle is rideable, and it is a bicycle rather than a car with two wheels. Speed comes from a rider pushing against gravity, rolling resistance and the air, so it takes a few seconds to get going, runs away from you downhill, dies on a steep enough climb, and rolls backwards if you stop pointing uphill.
    • ·It is not self-balancing, because bicycles are not. Come to a stop and the rider slides forward off the saddle, puts a foot down and leans the machine onto that leg.
    • ·Steering is the arrow keys and only the arrow keys. The bike goes where the front wheel is pointed rather than where the camera is looking, and it leans by the angle that actually balances the turn.

  110. 2026-08-08 · v2026.08.08

    Streamed towns load whole and sharpen by view, not in patches

    • ·A town arrives whole and soft now, sharpening where you look, instead of assembling in patches. Turning your head refreshes what you are looking at, which it did not before.
    • ·Standing still costs half the graphics work, and a single input restores everything before you can notice. On a warm laptop that is the difference between idling cool and cooking while parked.
    • ·The walker and the drone no longer wear a flat dark patch across the shoulders, and distant rooftops stop arriving and leaving again as you turn.

  111. 2026-08-07 · v2026.08.07

    The four walked towns opened to every visitor

    • ·Four of the five captured places are walked, not driven, and until today the only way in was an internal test page. /explore is that way in, made public: pick a town, walk it or fly it by drone.
    • ·The cities page shows every place drawn as its own street map, the same maps the game navigates by, with the coordinates under each name.
    • ·Pricing names its lanes: what stays free, what a Pro tier will be for once the library earns it, and licensing a capture of your own place. None of it has a number yet, on purpose.
    • ·The walking HUD lost its boxes. What remains is type floating on the place itself, held legible by a soft corner shade instead of chrome.

  112. 2026-08-06 · v2026.08.06

    A HUD map of the town, plus run and jump on foot

    • ·Keep moving for a few seconds and you break into a run, the way a person with somewhere to be actually does. It is a real gait rather than the walk cycle played fast, which is what it was: knees pumping like a silent film.
    • ·Space jumps, enough to hop a kerb or a low wall, and the drone holds whatever height you left it at as it crosses a valley.
    • ·The map used to draw only the network it was certain you could walk, so driving past the last certified street sailed your marker off the edge into nothing. It covers the whole captured place now.
    • ·Lourmarin had a subtler version of the same lie. The village is terraced, and the map only believed in steps it could climb back up, so everything below a terrace edge was left off it: five sixths of the walkable village.

  113. 2026-08-03 · v2026.08.03

    Walk collision on real ground, and a reachability map

    • ·These towns sit on hillsides, and on foot you were not really standing on them. Underneath every place was a single flat plane set at the height the car needs, and wherever the real street ran below it you walked across the gap instead of down the hill. In La Sarraz that covered a quarter of the place, by as much as six metres.
    • ·The plane is gone. You walk on the captured surface, and the drone can fly down into the lower town rather than stopping at an invisible ceiling. Where a scan has a hole you get put back on the last solid ground you stood on.
    • ·The map is a street map now. It used to trace the outline of the ground you could stand on and fill it in, which can never look like a map: every wobble in the scan became a wobble in the shape, and a three metre lane came out as a wiggly ribbon.

  114. 2026-07-30 · v2026.07.30

    Lourmarin added: a fourth drivable capture, about 200 by 300 m

    • ·A fourth place to drive. The capture runs about two hundred metres of village one way and three hundred the other, with stone going up thirty metres on either side of lanes that mostly leave the car a few metres of room.
    • ·This one came as a single file of 14.8 million splats with no detail levels of its own, so the four the game streams were built here, each thinned down from the one above it.
    • ·It nearly did not drive at all. Two stray triangles left over from the scan were hanging in mid air a metre and a half from where the car starts, low enough to catch the bumper and small enough that every check we had said the ground was clear. Colliders now throw away specks that size.

  115. 2026-07-28 · v2026.07.28

    La Sarraz, La Filature and Aix-en-Provence added

    • ·La Sarraz, a hilltop town in Vaud. La Filature, the old mill yard next door. And Aix-en-Provence, three kilometres of streets in the historic centre, captured on foot at eye level rather than from the air.
    • ·Each one collides for real. The ground under the car comes from the capture itself, so the road rises and falls where the real one does, and the walls stop you where the real walls are.
    • ·They start pointed down the street. In a medieval lane there is about two metres of room either side of the car, so which way it faces when it lands is the difference between driving away and sitting nose-first in a wall.

  116. 2026-07-11 · v2026.07.11

    Reverse camera on the hood and driver-seat views

    • ·Reversing now works like a real car. From the hood and driver's-seat views, backing up brings a small rear-view screen onto the dashboard showing the road behind you, instead of the whole view swinging around to face the back.
    • ·A new page lays out what this is for: a test-drive on a real street, walking a venue before you fly out or a building before it's built, driving a trip before people book it, and real places dropped into a game.

  117. 2026-06-27 · v2026.06.27

    Splat-on-splat collision, and NPC behaviour trees

    • ·A car that is itself a scan now drives inside a captured place and collides with it for real. Getting one capture to physically push against another, live in a browser, is a hard problem, and it is holding.
    • ·The people in the scene move with a real sense of the place. They read where they can go and what is in the way, and it holds up while they walk, react, and get out of the car's path.
    • ·Looking ahead: we have started research into captures that move rather than hold a single frozen moment. Early days, but it is the path to weather, traffic, and a day that turns.

  118. 2026-06-22 · v2026.06.22

    Landing rebuilt as the driver seat, with an OPFS warm cache on repeat visits

    • ·The landing is now the driver's seat. The page is the windshield, the controls sit on the dashboard, and "Ignite & drive" drops you straight into a real place, with the studio and the coming SDK a click away.
    • ·Repeat visits are near-instant. Come back and you go straight to driving instead of waiting on a fresh load.
    • ·No dead ends: if your browser or phone can't run the live demo yet, you still see the real drive footage, with one tap to be notified when it's ready for you.
    • ·Leaving the demo now takes you back to the home page.

  119. 2026-06-15 · v2026.06.15

    More splats held on screen at the same frame rate

    • ·More detail held on screen at the same framerate.
    • ·Driving polish. The wheels and braking feel right.

  120. 2026-06-13 · v2026.06.13

    Performance and stability pass for integrated GPUs

    • ·A broad performance and stability pass, smoother on ordinary laptops and built-in graphics, with fewer hitches.
    • ·Effects default off, so the capture's real light comes through. Tone and colour adjustments are opt-in for weaker captures.
    • ·Lighter, faster pages.

  121. 2026-06-11 · v2026.06.11

    One tap from landing to driving, with no asset pop-in

    • ·The path from landing to driving is one tap, no menus in the way.
    • ·The scene finishes loading behind a single welcome card, so it's whole the moment you start. Nothing pops in.
    • ·Cleaner HUD and a tidied Settings panel.

  122. 2026-06-06 · v2026.06.06

    An NPC pedestrian with a patrol route in Ludlow

    • ·A pedestrian now walks a route along the Ludlow pavement, glances over and waves when you pull up, and bolts when you drive at it.
    • ·The car physically interacts with it. You can nudge or knock it down, and it picks itself back up.

  123. 2026-06-03 · v2026.06.03

    Hood camera default, rebindable controls, and touch groundwork

    • ·Drives open on the hood camera, from the driver's seat.
    • ·Rebindable controls, plus handling and camera tuning.
    • ·Phones get a proper coming-soon page, and more browsers are supported.

  124. 2026-05-30 · v2026.05.30

    Collision: walls, kerbs and props stop the car

    • ·Walls, kerbs and props stop the car properly, and the ride is smooth.
    • ·The street planter is a real object you can bump and shove around.

  125. 2026-05-28 · v2026.05.28

    Demo scoped to Ludlow Square, one drivable city block

    • ·Focused the public demo on its strongest scene, Ludlow Square, a drivable city block, with a night aerial flyover as a second, opt-in experience.
    • ·Trimmed the live site down to the demo and its marketing pages.

  126. 2026-05-20 · v2026.05.20

    Adaptive streaming: detail scales with connection speed

    • ·Scenes adapt to your connection: more detail when the network allows, gracefully less when it doesn't, without stutter.
    • ·Detail is spent where you're actually looking.
    • ·Quality steps up without ever blanking the frame.

  127. 2026-05-19 · v2026.05.19

    Chunked scene streaming replaces the single-file download

    • ·Big scenes now stream in rather than arriving as one large download. The first view comes fast, and the rest fills in as you go.

  128. 2026-05-16 · v2026.05.16

    Audio pass: ambient bed, per-arena music, surface-matched collision SFX

    • ·A full audio pass: an ambient bed, per-place music, and collision sound that matches the surface you hit.
    • ·Impacts land across senses at once: sound, a screen pulse, and gamepad or phone vibration.
    • ·Photo mode: free-fly camera, framing grid, and one-tap capture.
    • ·A settings drawer for visuals, audio, accessibility, and diagnostics.
    • ·The title screen runs on the live scene.
    • ·Optional ways to play: a combo meter, a photo hunt, and a speed run, all off the critical path.
    • ·Your history persists: a drive log, lifetime stats, a photo gallery, streaks, and achievements.
    • ·Reflections and HDR output, with the car picking up the ambient colour of the place it's in.
    • ·Works offline after the first visit, plus marketing pages and an invite system.

  129. 2026-05-14 · v2026.05.14

    Visual presets, photo mode and a settings panel

    • ·Visual presets for the look of a scene.
    • ·Effects that sell the drive: dust, tyre smoke, brake heat, contact shadows.
    • ·Photo mode, an ambient soundtrack, and the first settings drawer.
    • ·Feel: brake-punch camera, speed lines, G-force tilt, and controller vibration.

  130. 2026-05-13 · v2026.05.13

    Chunk streaming, telemetry and a smoothed chase camera

    • ·Streaming, usage insight, and a smooth chase camera came together.
    • ·Reflections, contact shadows, and detail that scales with distance.
    • ·Drive against the real geometry of the place. Walls and surfaces stop the car.

  131. 2026-05-09 · v2026.05.09

    First photoreal frame rendering on integrated graphics

    • ·First photoreal scene rendering live in a browser tab, on built-in graphics, not just a high-end card.
    • ·A compatibility check that guides unsupported browsers instead of failing silently.
    • ·Fast on the first visit, instant after, even offline.