Alaas
- Genre
- Interactive museum
- Plays in
- The browser, phones too
- Languages
- Sakha, English, Russian
- Price
- Free
- Licence
- Code MIT, texts CC BY-SA
An interactive museum: a first-person walk through a Sakha summer homestead in Central Yakutia.
About
Alaas is a 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.
It is told from the Sakha point of view. The birch-bark urasa, the balagan with its hearth, the serge hitching posts, the kymys and the fire’s spirit are shown as a living culture, in its own words. Read the announcement.
Key features
- 51 explainer cards in Sakha, English and Russian, with sources and 72 reference images
- Hands-on acts done with respect: feed the fire, tie a ribbon on the serge, carry water, pick berries. Sacred rites are only explained.
- A living alaas: taiga, wind in the grass, birds, a lake with reflections, drifting cloud shadows and real field recordings
- Runs in the browser at 60 fps on computers and 30 fps on phones, so they stay cool; no account needed; progress stays on your device
Because AI helped make it, it’s open source, so anyone can check the work. If you know Sakha life and something is wrong or missing, a correction is the most valuable thing you can send me.
Credits
Alaas
Directed and reviewed by Georgii Antipin
Made with
- Claude (Anthropic): code, models, shaders and a first pass of the texts and research
- three.js and Vite
Sakha texts
- Checked by Georgii Antipin
Third-party material
- Textures: Poly Haven, ambientCG (CC0)
- Reference images: Wikimedia Commons
- Field recordings: CC0 and CC BY-SA authors
- Fonts: Open Sans, Noto Serif (SIL OFL)
Every author is listed in the project’s credits file.
