New project ·
Alaas, an interactive museum, lets you walk through a Sakha summer homestead
Meet Alaas, a new little project from Springfolk. It’s a first-person walk through a traditional Sakha summer homestead, a saiylyk, set in an alaas: the round hollow in the taiga with a lake in the middle and a ring of meadow around it, where Sakha families have kept horses and cattle for centuries.
This is a virtual museum. You walk, look and learn. Look at a thing, press E for a short note, press E again for the full read. There are 51 explainer cards, each with sources and reference photos, from the birch-bark urasa and the balagan with its ohokh hearth to the serge hitching posts and the carved choroon cups for kymys. A journal keeps what you’ve found and hints at where the rest is.
You can also do a few things with your own hands: feed the fire, tie a ribbon on the serge, carry water, lay firewood, pick berries. Sacred rites are only explained: the museum never has you perform them.
It runs in the browser, phones included, with no account and no download. Your progress stays on your device. Language is picked from your browser (press L to switch).
A word on how it’s made
I built Alaas with a lot of help from AI (Claude): the code, the 3D models and a first pass of the texts and research. I directed and reviewed all of it, and I checked every Sakha text myself.
Because AI helped make it, it’s open source, so anyone can check the work. The code is MIT and the texts are CC BY-SA, on GitHub. If you know Sakha life and something is wrong or missing, a correction is the most valuable thing you can send me, by email or through GitHub Issues. I’m always happy to credit them and fix what’s wrong, to keep this project alive and running.
— Georgii Antipin, CEO of Springfolk