Tidepool vase
A wide shoulder of amber glass that pools the light at its base.
$148
Solvane glass studio · a Lens template demo
Bend the light.
Hand-blown vessels, lamps and lenses from a two-furnace studio. This whole page sits under real glass: drag a lens across the words, pull two together until they melt, tap any glass to make it ripple.
- 1,180 °Cfurnace, lit every morning
- 38 hoursof slow cooling per piece
- No mouldsevery shape is breathed
Spring pieces
Four pieces, one breath each.
Coloured glass is thick where light works hardest. Hold one to a window and the room bends inside it.
Halo tumbler
Heavy-bottomed and slightly tapered, in lagoon teal. Sold as a pair.
$64
Ember carafe
A tall neck, a round belly and a lip that pours without a drip.
$112
Moonwell lamp
A domed shade of pale gold glass on a slim stem. Warm, low, soft.
$236
The studio
Every piece starts as a glowing drop on the end of a steel pipe.
- 01
Gather
A drop of molten glass is wound onto the pipe like honey on a spoon, then rolled smooth on a steel table.
- 02
Breathe
One long breath opens a bubble inside. Heat, swing and gravity do the rest; tools only guide it.
- 03
Rest
The finished piece cools in a warm oven for a day and a half, so it never holds a hidden strain.
Inside the Lens template
Glass that behaves like glass.
Everything floating on this page is one piece of simulated glass, drawn with WebGL2 in under 40 KB of code and no libraries.
Real refraction
A height at every pixel gives a surface normal; Snell's law bends each ray through it. Domes magnify, bevels curl the edges.
Light splits at the edge
Red, green and blue each get their own refractive index, so thin rainbow fringes appear where the glass is steepest.
Liquid when they touch
Lenses, the menu bar and the dock share one smooth-union shape. Bring two close and they flow together; pull and they part.
Words stay words
The text is plain HTML: selectable, searchable, read aloud by screen readers. The glass bends a live copy of it.
Questions
Asked through the glass.
Is the text under the glass real text?
Yes. Every word on the page is ordinary HTML that search engines, screen readers and copy-and-paste all see. Inside the glass you are looking at a live copy of that text, redrawn as you scroll, which is what the lens bends.
How does the glass bend the page?
Each piece of glass has a height at every pixel: a dome for the lenses, a rounded bevel for the bars and cards. The surface normal from that height goes through Snell's law of refraction, and the page is sampled where the bent ray lands. Red, green and blue use slightly different refractive indexes, which is why colours split at the edges.
Why do two lenses melt together?
All the floating glass is one shape built from a smooth union of signed distance fields. When two lenses come within a few dozen pixels, the union fills the gap with a curved bridge, so they flow into one drop; pull them apart and the bridge thins and snaps.
Will it slow my site down or break on phones?
The page shows a still poster first and starts WebGL about a second after it loads. It lowers its own resolution if frames run slow, stops drawing when the tab is hidden, holds still for visitors who ask for reduced motion, and falls back to the poster if the graphics context is lost.
Can I use Lens on my own website?
Yes. Lens is a website template from Apex Flow Digital: this page, the glass engine source, and one settings file for your colours, glass presets and lens sizes. Sites you build with it can be personal or commercial.
Put this glass on your own site.
Solvane is a made-up studio. The glass is real, and it can be yours.
Get the Lens template