The new tech that has excited us most in 2026 keeps trying not to look like a screen. Most of what caught our eye was about making the glass disappear, either by faking depth so well you stop noticing it or by swapping the screen for a real object. Meanwhile the browser kept closing the gap on the game engine.
Eight things worth your time
Spatial and Gaussian splats
1. A monitor that behaves like a window
This is a Gaussian splat of the room behind a desk, drawn on the monitor from the viewer's tracked eye position. Lean to one side and the room behind the screen shifts with you, so the monitor reads as a pane of glass. A depth camera even drops passers-by into the scene live. The interesting bit is the kit list: off-the-shelf tracking and no headset. That's a shop window or a product plinth waiting to happen. Watch it.
2. Portal jumping through Gaussian splat worlds
Walk up to a portal, step through and you're in a different AI-generated world, then another, all rendering in real time in a web browser on WebGPU. The top comment on the original post joked that portals will be the new browser tabs. For launches, a portal is a ready-made transition. Guests step through the product into its world, on a phone or a big screen, with nothing to install. Original post.
Physical and tangible
3. A platformer built from shadows
Put a mug or your hand in front of a projector, a webcam reads the shadow, and a small green square runs up it. The level is whatever you put on the table. TouchDesigner traces the shadows, Godot handles the physics and MadMapper keeps camera, projector and game aligned. Nobody needs instructions, which is what museum and family briefs keep asking us for.
4. A table that does the haptics
An ordinary table carries a mixed reality interface, so your fingers get real touch feedback without haptic gloves. The piece dates from 2019 and has been doing the rounds again as part of a series on tangible XR. It still holds up as a cheap, sturdy answer to the question every headset activation eventually hits: what does the guest actually touch? The series.
5. A newspaper written by AI and drawn by a plotter
An AI agent writes a personalised morning paper and a pen plotter draws it in ink. Small idea, good instinct. AI output that becomes a physical object makes a far better event takeaway than another QR code, and watching the plotter work is half the theatre. Try the printable version.
Real-time and the browser
6. Game-grade water in a web page
A real-time Three.js ocean with rolling swell, boat wakes, foam and buoyancy that holds up to a close look. A few years ago this was game-engine work. Now it opens from a link, which matters for any brief where the audience arrives on a phone and won't wait for an app. Original post.
7. A 3D world built by AI agents in eight hours
A living Three.js island, with diving birds, burrowing crabs and cloth moving in the wind, built almost entirely by prompting AI coding agents. By the maker's account it took about eight hours and $1,874 of model usage, and it holds 60fps at 1440p. The comments split between excitement and dread. Our read is that prototypes just got much cheaper, which helps R&D and pitching. Keeping a live install running ten hours a day is still a separate job.
8. A mountain run by live weather
Patagonia's Fitz Roy as a TouchDesigner particle mountain fed by live weather data. Wind sets the movement, temperature sets the colour and cloud cover drifts across the peak. It never looks the same twice, and that is the whole job of a lobby wall or reception screen people walk past every day. Original post.
What we're taking from it
The throughline is the screen getting harder to spot. Half of these pieces fake depth so well that the glass disappears, and the other half skip it for shadows, tables and paper. All of them make sense within a few seconds, which was the brief we set ourselves for Nike NOCTA's London launch, where a TouchDesigner laser-targeting game projected across the Truman Brewery had to read instantly to guests who had never seen it before. Get in touch if any of this maps to something you're trying to build.
