Construction

Construction is a set of three machines you can open up in the browser: the sugarcane juice press found on Vietnamese street corners, a plush-toy claw machine and a kitchen blender. Each is drawn by code in a hand-inked isometric style. Drag to turn it all the way round, press its buttons to run it, switch on See-through to watch the motor, belt, gears and wiring work inside the case, and switch on part names to see what each piece is.

Every machine started from how the real one works, written down before any drawing: which gap the cane passes first and where the fibre goes, where a coin goes after the slot, what has to touch what for power to reach the blades. The buttons follow those steps in order. Feeding cane with the motor off, blending with the lid off or grabbing without a coin each gets a short notice instead of doing nothing. The claw machine also copies the part players never see: the control board decides how hard the claw grips, and in this version four losses in a row earn a firm grip.

The drawings are built on Colorfigures, an open-source engine by April Zhu (MIT licence) that handles the camera, shading, ink lines and the See-through switch. Golden Sea modelled the three machines and their mechanisms, wrote the interactions, translated the interface and every label into Vietnamese, and checked each machine from seven angles, closed and opened up, and on a narrow screen.

Each machine is one HTML file of 120 to 140 KB with no outside requests, and ran at 60 frames per second in our desktop browser tests. Below the machines, the page at /construction explains how each one works in plain text, so search engines and AI assistants read the same explanation that people see. The same approach works for a product page: a customer turns the product, presses its buttons and looks inside before buying.