ROKO: a satirical launch site where one real-time 3D stone tells the story

Launch sites for AI hardware have become a genre of their own: one glossy object, a scroll story, big promises. VITON¹³ builds concept sites to show its range in genres where it has no client project to point to yet, and ROKO is the one with a joke in it. The product is a river pebble launched like an AI device; the footnote to “Powered by AI*” reads “Ancient Igneous”.

The brief we set ourselves was to make a deliberately useless product feel like a flagship launch: premium materials, real interactions and jokes that land for people who follow AI news. The structure and the logic follow Lusion’s oryzo.ai, where one 3D object carries the whole page; the product, the copy, the 3D and every image are ours.

One English page with 12 sections: a flat-lay hero on a walnut desk, an AI section, a wearable section, features, “under-rock encryption”, a macro loupe, sustainability, reviews, a social strip, three product tiers in five colourways, “open weights” and a footer. Between sections the same stone rises off the desk, hangs as a pendant, pins papers in the wind, lands in the O’s of the wordmark and stacks into a cairn.

Every section has something to do. A chat where ROKO thinks for 4.5 billion years and answers “…”; a prompt that puts sunglasses, a party hat, googly eyes, a bow tie or a crown on the live stone; temperature buttons for a thermal model; a polarised-light loupe; a 24-second film played in real time; synthesized sound; and a real .obj download of the “open weights”. The last screen turns to the reader: if a studio can sell a rock, imagine what it can do for a brand.

The stone is generated in code. Seeded noise erodes an egg-shaped ellipsoid, five seeds are stored as morph targets, and a patched physical material adds speckle, a white quartz vein, micro-bump, a thermal “ironbow” mode with isotherms and an iridescent AI rim. A scene director gives every section a pose — stone, props, light and background — and blends one section’s exit into the next one’s entry over a screen of scroll, so the pebble stays one object from the hero to the footer.

The desk, the technical drawing, the props and nine product shots are rendered from the same scene. The photos with people and three six-second films were generated through CometAPI (Nano Banana Pro for stills, Veo 3.1 fast for video) with our own render of the pebble as the product reference, so the stone in every photo is this one. Photos, films and fonts load as the visitor reaches them; the page is marked noindex, nofollow.

The site is live at tarasovvitalii.com/demos/roko/ as one page with 12 sections, 20 images and 3 films, built on 28 September 2026. The main script, three.js included, is 0.71 MB, or 0.19 MB gzipped; the whole build is 6.6 MB, 2.9 MB of it films that load only when reached. The same day we clicked through every interaction in headless Chrome at 1440 × 900 and on a 390 px phone screen, with a clean console.

On the live address the same day Lighthouse gave performance 43 on mobile and 64 on desktop (medians of three runs), with best practices at 100 and accessibility at 92; the page transfers 0.55 MB on load, and the photos and films follow as the visitor scrolls. The phone score is held back by long main-thread tasks at start-up (total blocking time 3.6 s) and a late largest paint, the hero text, at 4.2 s.

ROKO is a concept VITON¹³ built to show range, not a commissioned project. The product, its reviews, press and prices are satire: nothing is for sale, and the site has no client, no domain of its own, no users, no traffic and no enquiries. The people in the photos and films are generated, not real customers, and the copy is in English only.

Frame rates were spot-checked on one machine in headless Chrome (about 100 fps in the AI section, 58 fps in the wearable strip), not measured across devices, and they say nothing about older phones. Lighthouse measures loading, not how smoothly the 3D scene runs. The demo is kept out of search on purpose, so it has no search results to show.

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