Origins

Fold.page was started by Ben. The first three-dimensional website he ever built was a senior year graphic design project — a report on Muriel Cooper. Instead of creating a static 2D graphic design like his peers he modeled a typographic scene in 3D Studio Max and exported it to VRML (a deprecated browser technology). On the project's due date — a browser projected in a dark computer lab, typography in a black void moved, rotated, scaled — navigating the project designed on and containing the ideas of Muriel Cooper's seminal work Information Landscapes. It only worked in one browser, it crashed the lab machines twice, but he got an A anyway. In the process of creating the project, he found himself exploring a forest of extruded typography outlining Cooper’s vision, and this left an impression on him.

He then got a job as a web developer, building things that were, professionally speaking, extremely flat: agency sites, dashboards, feature components, hybrid Cordova apps, design systems, component libraries, ADA compliance, and browser quirks—all progressively enhanced and gracefully degraded, with the same pixel-pushing scar tissue. But all that good work never scratched the itch left by that Graphic Design school project; a day job was never going to give him an excuse to explore Muriel Cooper’s fringe, multidimensional medium. So he built one for his personal site. The first version, using Impress.js and CSS transforms, was limited; the next jumped to Three.js and WebGL, bringing cameras, dynamic fields of view, ray-casting, and a whole new set of concerns. It looked good, but the bespoke code was messy and limiting—and when he tried to build yet another version, everything needed to be re-coded from scratch.

Ben set out to solve this problem once instead of repeatedly. Driven by Muriel Cooper's vision of a multi-dimensional digital medium he set out to create a tool that would make designing in Cooper's 3D medium easy. He pulled the core parts of his hand-rolled scene that were working into a small reusable library and set course to refine & expand on the features. The tool created for personal use grew into something useful; it seemed like it would be useful to the broader web developer community and maybe help move Cooper's vision of a multi-dimensional medium away from the fringes and onto the web. So he decided to make the library available to others. Fold.page is that library. Along the way a small team formed around the ambitious mission of creating a truly spatial web and Fold Company was created. Fold.page is just the beginning.