I'm impressed that not only did this run on my Android phone in the stock browser, but that it was relatively smooth (hitching infrequently but for probably 300ms when it did).
There's a reason that this technique (prerendered sprites on camera-facing billboards) has been used for so many years, and continues to be used to this day. When you have an effect too intensive to be rendered in real time, prerendered billboards are a workaround that can often yield impressive results. Clouds and other pseudo-particle effects are a really common place to see them these days, but I remember first be…
I remember them from Super Mario 64. They used sprites do give the impression of high-poly spheres: http://i.imgur.com/59T0Kqj.jpg
