The Reliquary Opens: A 3D Museum in the Browser

Vaynerov Project Reliquary is open. It does one thing: you give it a link, and it hangs the thing behind that link on a wall in a museum you can walk through. Paste a second link and a second frame appears further down the gallery. Keep going and the building grows — new rooms, new walls, new light — around exhibits that never move once they're placed.

The parse happens server-side: our curator fetches the page through a guarded fetch, reads whatever structured claims it makes about itself — JSON-LD first, OpenGraph after, plain old <title> as the floor — and hands back a title, a description, a price where one is unambiguous, and up to eight images. Everything after that is your browser's job.

Your exhibits never leave your browser

There are no accounts and no database. Your museum lives in one localStorage key on the device you built it on, capped at sixty exhibits, and we never see it. That is the whole privacy model, and it is deliberately too simple to get wrong. The trade is equally plain: clear your site data and the building empties, and it does not follow you to another device.

The museum itself carries no downloaded assets whatsoever. Plaster, walnut skirting, stone pilasters, gilt frames, the plaques, the lettering over the lobby arch — all of it is drawn with a canvas at runtime and uploaded as texture. A single roving spotlight follows you from room to room rather than a hard cut at each doorway, warm amber everywhere, teal used only as a scalpel on portals and baseboards. It is a real 3D building that weighs about as much as a web page.

Some sites won't talk to servers at all — eBay, LiveAuctioneers and Catawiki all run bot walls, and one of them serves a captcha challenge with a 200 status code just to keep things interesting. When we hit one, the Reliquary says so and offers the way around it: your browser is already past the wall, so select the page, copy it, paste it in. That path makes zero network requests. Paste a whole catalog page and you get a whole wing.

Shipping alongside

The Reliquary comes out of the same release as two other pieces of work. The first is a shared 3D engine underneath the Lab — quality tiers, touch controls, a fullscreen contract, one canvas — which now carries nine games and lent the museum its mobile thumbstick on day one. The second is language: the site, and the museum's entire interface, now run in English, Russian, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese. One string stays English on purpose. The name over the lobby arch reads VAYNEROV PROJECT RELIQUARY wherever you are, the way a building's name doesn't translate.

A guided tour mode — the camera walking you through the halls on rails — is sketched behind the same controller seam the walk mode uses. Until then, the doors are open and the halls are yours.