Netflix Video Views

2022, Mar 10
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For this seasonal installment of Netflix Hack Day I decided to brush up on my 3D skills by signing up for Bruno Simon's ThreeJS Journey course. Afterwards I was inspired to play around with the concept of embedding video within a 3D scene. Here's a small interactive demo I made from that exploration which applies a video texture to a TV model and also incorporates a bloom post-processing effect to make it more realistic.

Netflix 3D demo

Taking this idea further for Hack Day, I created Video Views which is a React Three Fiber-based Chrome extension that transports the Netflix video player into a 3D viewing diorama. Check out the video below to see the full demo!

YouTube video

Originally I wanted to use the video stream as a video texture in the same way but due to security restrictions I had to resort to an alternate solution. Thankfully I got decent results by separately applying a CSS transform to the video element. This worked out well since it allowed me to leverage CSS filters to change the appearance.

It's been exciting to watch ThreeJS evolve over these past years and I'm really glad it's making 3D programming more approachable for developers ( thanks to its welcoming abstraction of WebGL )