The Grand Marquee

A first-person 3D movie theater that behaves like a real digital cinema: free public-domain films playing on live daily showtimes, synced to your own clock.

Visit the theater: liveatgrandmarquee.com

Built with: Three.js · Vanilla JS (ES Modules) · Web Audio API · Canvas 2D textures · WebSockets · WebXR

Overview

The Grand Marquee is a browser-native cinema you walk through in first person. An Art Deco lobby greets you with a chase-light marquee, a live showtimes board, a ticket booth, and a concession stand, then opens onto three auditoriums: two rotating classic features and an Animation House. Everything runs on real time. If a feature started at 7:40 and you sit down at 8:00, the film is already twenty minutes in, seeked and drift-corrected against your wall clock.

Highlights

• Real showtimes, not menus. A rolling 24-hour program of pre-show reel, feature, and intermission means the theater is always mid-schedule. Sit down whenever you arrive and the screening is already where it should be.
• A daily-seeded program. The date seeds a deterministic generator that lays out the whole day: which films play in which auditorium, the showtime stagger, and the marquee headliner. Everyone who visits on the same day shares the same lineup, and at midnight the theater rebuilds itself with a fresh one.
• Real films, freely licensed. Eighteen public-domain and Creative Commons titles stream in, from Nosferatu and Night of the Living Dead to the Blender open movies, with silent-era features flagged and placarded so the quiet reads as intentional.
• A theater that feels alive. Projector beams catch drifting dust, house lights dim as the feature starts, and each room’s glow is tinted in real time by the average color of the frame on screen. Daily-seeded patrons arrive early, claim seats, and head home.
• Positional sound. Movie audio emits from the screen itself through Web Audio, while a lobby jukebox spins a daily playlist of 1920s jazz that ducks the moment you step into an auditorium.
• Small touches, everywhere. A playful house currency for tickets and popcorn, a pocket phone for the full program, optional shared-theater multiplayer over the local network, and an experimental VR mode.

Tech and Architecture

The Grand Marquee is a zero-build static site: ES modules with Three.js pinned from a CDN import map, and pure scheduling and RNG logic kept separate from rendering so it can be unit-tested in Node. A seeded generator produces the day’s program, a clock-sync layer seeks each screen video to the correct moment and corrects drift, and canvas-drawn textures build the marquee, posters, and showtimes board. Films are streamed from Wikimedia Commons, chosen because it serves the CORS and range-request support that WebGL video textures require.

Process

The Grand Marquee was designed and built solo by directing AI and multi-agent workflows across the scheduling model, world geometry, video and audio pipelines, and the optional multiplayer relay.