Tao Tajima – WebGL and GreenSock Animation

Really disorienting experience on an iPad. The pollution of my back button history was a surprise.

wow.. you're not browsing wikipedia pages. who cares about the browser history?

Me. Having to back through several odd transitions was fairly disorienting and not the experience I was expecting.

Despite that - very cool website, can't complain about the overall experience.

Extracting one part of a conversation I had on Reddit with someone who's worked with GreenSock --

"GSAP is fairly standard on commercial sites. It’s the most mature and cross tested animation option, but it’s best features aren’t free. I’d argue there’s a good reason for that though, because the codebase is pretty impressive and can’t be cheap to maintain.

Most people say the biggest advantage of GSAP is the timeline. When paired with SVGs (and using GSAP’s morph plugin) there’s some pretty crazy and unexplored UI orientated options that become very possible. I rarely have a client with a budget to go there, but why use another tool that can’t do such amazing SVG manipulations in real time and synced to other movement on the screen?

I cannot overstate how powerful that is.

But the bottom line is that not enough “ux” folk are good enough with JavaScript to really be creative with GSAP. So it’s mostly front Enders that use it or propose it in meetings.

Also I’m not 100% sure... but I think I recall reading somewhere that a lot of the software solutions trying to make web animation “easy” for designers, use GSAP under the hood. So I look as GSAP a lot like D3. Since they’re advanced/enterprise solutions, and not easy to use (but not hard at all for proper programmers), there’s a lot of attempts to make it easier with libraries built on top of their bases through licensing."

I am not aware of having any form of vestibular disorder, and it has generally taken fairly deliberate effort to cause any discomfort when looking at a screen—A Slower Speed of Light was able to make me feel mild discomfort after ten minutes, which I understand to be not uncommon, but it’s almost alone in that.

But this site is awful. I was feeling fine before, but within half a minute I was feeling mild pain in the back of my eyes and the beginnings of stomach churning. The animation was choppy and severely disorienting. Scrolling switching pages is not normal and is always, uniformly a bad idea. So after only half a minute I closed it. (That is, half a minute after the it finished loading—before that, there was a loading screen for perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds, which is never a good sign. In the normal way of things, I’d probably have closed it before it ever finished loading, but I had been expecting some sort of article on combining WebGL and GSAP, rather than a demonstration that would make me feel sick.)

My stomach is not feeling any better a few minutes later. I shall now go and have a drink and a walk around.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should. As implemented, this is terrible.