Imagine you’re a young dolphin in the vast open sea.

You’re out playing with your family. Your dad, mum, and siblings. All of you are swimming up to 100 miles a day.

But suddenly, things change. You’re violently snatched from your home. Separated from your loved ones--you're in disarray. And you're put in a tank one millionth the size of your home. How would you feel?

The mental, emotional and physical stresses for dolphins in captivity are unimaginable. Their immune system weakens, making them prone to diseases. The death rate for infant dolphins is also significantly higher in captivity.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society wanted to highlight this chilling reality in the most engaging and memorable manner possible.

So what if we could show the world how the playful dolphins are affected by the drastic change of the size of their homes?

More than a website, Resizemyhome.com was an interactive experience that utilised web GL to transport visitors to the world’s largest playground, where they’re invited to interact with dolphins in the vast expanse of the ocean.

Users were then prompted to make their browsers smaller. That’s when reality started to sink in. As users resized their browsers, the dolphins reacted accordingly; stress and panic ensued. Our ocean friends would attempt to escape their impending doom. But there’s nowhere to go.

A call-to-action led users to pledge their support and make a stand against dolphin enclosures. In essence, it’s a call for visitors to help the dolphins ‘resize their homes’.

Everything on the website was created with Web GL. The idea was also inspired by responsive design. The act of resizing a browser to trigger a change in content seemed to mirror our objective. While responsive design worked well with 2D content; the real technological challenge was applying it to 3D content.

We needed the interactive dolphins to respond naturally to user input, the environment (size of the browser) and each other. With these requirements in place, we knew the dolphins couldn't be skinned and brought to life by an animator. Instead, the dolphins needed to be skinned entirely in code.

This resulted in the world's first naturally-behaving dolphins that interacted with both user, and the window, created in Web GL.

Since the campaign launch, numerous publications, online platforms and news networks have shared the project, while countless others have taken the pledge to not buy tickets to dolphin shows.