shlokkhemani/ode-to-yosemite

This is a to-scale, interactive 3D model of Yosemite Valley that runs in a web browser. You can fly or walk through the valley, look around freely, and observe it at five different times of day. The project was built from a single prompt by Fable 5 (an Anthropic AI model) running in Claude Code, as a demonstration of what the model could produce end-to-end in one session. The terrain uses real elevation data from NASA/USGS surveys, decoded from open AWS terrain tiles at roughly 7.6 meters of resolution per sample. Satellite imagery from Esri covers the valley floor and walls. The model analyzed the color and slope data in that imagery to distinguish where forest, granite, meadow, and water actually are, then placed about 266,000 trees in the locations where real forest stands, using three varieties: ponderosa pine, incense cedar, and black oak. Meadows stay open, cliff faces stay bare. The six major waterfalls of the valley (Yosemite Falls, Bridalveil, Vernal, Nevada, Ribbon, and their upper and lower sections) are placed at their actual coordinates as determined by probing the elevation data for where the cliff drops match published heights. A second version of the project added atmospheric haze, valley fog that pools at dawn and burns off by midday, four weather states (clear, clouds, rain, and snow that accumulates on flat surfaces), ravens soaring real updraft locations, mule deer in the actual meadows, and human infrastructure from OpenStreetMap: roads, over 1,200 building footprints in Yosemite Village and nearby areas, and slow vehicle traffic with headlights at night. All sounds in the project are synthesized rather than recorded, including rain, wind, birdsong, and crickets. The project includes tools to rebuild the terrain data from scratch, run headless verification tests, capture screenshots from fixed viewpoints, and render a short cinematic video using a fixed-timestep animation loop and an offline audio synthesizer. To run it locally, you install dependencies with npm install and start it with npm run dev. A live version is also hosted on Vercel. Controls are keyboard and mouse: WASD to move, mouse to look, number keys for time of day, R for weather, and F to toggle between fly and walk modes.