Neubor experiments · 03
Scroll, and the car comes apart — wheels, shell, cabin, engine, piece by piece, in the order a fitter would take them. Scroll back up and your own thumb reassembles it. No video anywhere: every frame is computed from where you stopped.
Showing the exploded drawing and the written account — either you asked for reduced motion, or this browser has no WebGL. The argument is all here.
The written account
The car is generated — around forty parts, materials and lights rather than a video — and the disassembly is scrubbed to the scroll, so it runs equally well in both directions. The same mechanism fits any product a customer should see the inside of: a boiler, a staircase, a kitchen, a machine your trade actually sells.
00
One family hatchback, whole, under one key light. Scroll, and you take it apart.
The car is generated — forty-odd parts built from profiles and primitives, painted with a real lighting model rather than a photograph. It exists so the mechanism can be honest: nothing below is a video, and nothing is pre-rendered. Every frame is computed from where your thumb is on the page.
01
Four wheels roll clear, and the running gear is suddenly visible.
The first thing any workshop does. The wheels carry their rims and tyres out with them, and what they leave behind — discs, calipers, springs — is the part of a car a customer pays for and never sees. The scrub means you can hold the page half-way and look.
02
Discs, calipers and coil springs — the parts an invoice calls 'labour'.
A service sheet says 'discs and pads, front'. This stage is that line item, standing in space where you can walk round it. The commercial argument writes itself for any trade whose work is invisible the moment the panels go back on.
03
Bonnet, doors, roof and wings fan open like a drawing coming off the page.
The body is not one piece — it is nine, and they separate the way an exploded parts diagram always promised they would. The choreography is staggered so each panel has its own moment: bonnet first, then doors, then the roof with the glass.
04
Seats, dash and wheel rise out of the tub — the room you actually sit in.
With the shell away the cabin reads as what it is: furniture bolted to a floor pan. Seats and dashboard lift clear, and the steering wheel spins out on its own axis, because a little theatre at the right moment is what makes a mechanism feel loved.
05
The block gives up its head, its pistons and its manifold, one at a time.
The engine is the deepest nest: block, head, four pistons, intake, radiator, battery, exhaust. They separate in dependency order — the same order a fitter would take them off — so scrolling slowly reads as a procedure, not an effect.
06
The whole car, held apart in one constellation. Nothing hidden, nothing merged.
Forty-odd parts hang in an ordered lattice — wheels flanking, shell above, drivetrain below — and the camera pulls wide enough to hold all of it. This is the frame that says what the page is: a bill of materials you can stand inside.
07
Scroll back up and it reassembles around your colour.
The paint chips repaint the shell in one frame — a configurator in miniature, and the reason a dealer, a fabricator or a kitchen fitter should care: the same mechanism shows THEIR product, in THEIR finishes, taken apart and put back together by the customer's own hand.