Bringing 'The Gateless Gate' to Life with Claude: An Interactive 3D Zen Experience
Slackluster · reddit · 2026-08-19
The author released an interactive edition of 'The Gateless Gate', a collection of 49 Zen koans from 1228. Each koan features its own 3D scene, soundscape, and full spoken reading.
- Tech Stack: Everything is generated procedurally on startup except for the speech. The visual style uses ink outlines over paper grain, with page turns dissolving like wet ink.
- AI Workflow: The author used Claude to generate placeholder scenes for all koans based on their content, then manually tweaked composition, lighting, and models. While nothing shipped exactly as generated, having a base to react to made all the difference.
- Audio & Text: All sound is generated with no samples. An automated voice audition pipeline was built, allowing re-voicing the entire book with one command as speech models improve. The text was modernized, and missing prefaces were translated from the original Chinese.
The project took over a week of intense work, representing the most art direction the author has ever done.
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