Secret sauce was basically every element absolute positioned, with an event loop that was diffing a CSS transform tree each tick. Worked pretty well, but was basically a workaround for browser performance issues that ended up being fixed anyways. (Was hired by them to do their React component library long ago)

It’s an awfully big stretch to hype that up as some kind of direct GPU access, as in this quote from the TechCrunch article about the pivot:

“By bypassing the CSS and HTML renderers to talk directly to the graphics processing unit, Famo.us could supposedly make 3D physics and other visual wizardry common with native games run smoothly for apps in a mobile or web browser.”

Journalists always simplify things to the point they become meaningless.

But avoiding DOM layout and its performance issues was relatively innovative at the time. It wasn't unheard of, but no one had really turned it into a framework like they did.

You can't blame journalists when the CEO of the company was actively spouting this "interfaces directly with the GPU" bullshit to describe multiplying some matrices in JS.

They pivoted again to be a figma competitor. Yeah I think these days webgl is the way to go...

Totally.

https://threejs.org/

Or babylon.js

While WebGL 2.0 is already quite cool, having the missing features of GL ES 3.x or eventually WebGPU would be quite nice.

I still see too many WebGL demos that struggle on devices where native GL ES doesn't have any issues.

This article is hilarious. Or depressing. Maybe both.

"During the company’s debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Startup Battlefield competition, rather than giving a traditional pitch, Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb spent his whole six minutes asking people to imagine what could be done if apps were 3D instead of 2D and demoing a floating periodic table. [...] just days earlier, the team made its first pivot away from what it called BenchRank, a ranking system for people, into an HTML5 development platform."

"When TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha visited [their offices], [Famo.us's CEO] pointed to some desks that seemed adequate, but insisted they would be replaced soon because they weren’t the right kind of wood."

It is now 2019 and the front page of famous.co has a big video and a pre-order button. One begins to wonder if this is an actual company, or an excuse to get a lot of VC so its CEO and a few lucky employees can afford to have nice places to live in SF.

For some reason I remember famo.us as being some kind of mobile browser content render replacement (instead of using html+css), not a 3D engine.

Curious to know about the limitations.

The demos seem to run smoothly & are pretty impressive IMHO.