Meridian M-01

Meridian M-01 is a launch and reservation page for the first hand-wound calibre from Meridian, a one-bench watchmaker making eighteen watches in 2027. The page is the bench. The movement runs on it at your own time, and you wind it, take it apart, look at its finishing under a loupe and watch it start again.

It is a concept site, made by the Laarpi team with Laarpi's library and process. The watchmaker and the watch are invented.

The idea

The audience reads movements before dials: collectors of independent watchmaking, people saving for one serious mechanical watch, and watchmakers who will zoom in to check the bevels. The brief set three goals: reserve the eighteen numbered pieces, make the finishing legible to someone who has never held a loupe, and prove the calibre is a coherent machine, with parts, counts, gear ratios and a specification.

The metaphor is a watchmaker's bench: paper under north light, a loupe for a cursor, a crown you turn to store energy, and a parts sheet where the calibre lies in the order it is serviced.

The brief ruled out the usual luxury-watch look: black backgrounds, gold gradients, lens flares, invented press quotes and collector logos, stock watch models, and smooth fade-ups on everything. It also ruled out colour in the interface. The page is strictly paper, graphite and pencil greys, so every colour you see comes from light in the render: the warm German silver, the gold of the wheels, the blue of heat-blued screws and the red of the rubies.

What you can do

• Wind it. The movement lies under the light, its balance swinging four times a second and its hands at your local time. Press Wind or drag the 3D crown to add to a power reserve that runs down in real time. The page remembers the reserve between visits.
• Take it apart. Scroll and the movement settles flat into a ruled parts sheet. The parts leave in service order: screws, balance and cock, the click, pallets, ratchet and crown wheel, barrel and bridge, train and stem, until the bare plate is left. Every cell gives the part's classification number, count, finish and magnification.
• Look closer. Five macro lenses travel across perlage, Côtes de Genève stripes, an inward bevel, black polish and heat-blued screws. As they move, the polished surfaces turn from black to white, the way they do under a real loupe.
• Put it back. The parts come back, plate first and balance last. The watch has no power until the crown is wound, and scrolling winds it. Then the balance starts and the beats are counted.
• Reserve one. The running movement sits beside a specification table with a dimension line, then a ledger of the eighteen numbers and a deposit button.

The interface moves in whole beats of the escapement, in eighth-of-a-second steps. Smooth motion is kept for physics only: the balance swing and parts gliding as you scroll.

How it's made

The M-01 is a procedural model at true millimetre scale. The plate and bridges are traced from drafted outlines, with 45-degree bevels. The going train uses real ratios (96/12, 80/10, 75/10, 112/7), with a 15-tooth escape wheel, a pallet fork and a balance carrying eight gold screws and a breathing overcoil. The wheels are generated from their tooth counts.

The finishing is computed per pixel rather than painted: perlage, Côtes de Genève with the arcs of the polishing peg, mirror bevels, black polish, snailing, sunburst and thin-film bluing. Tool marks appear only under magnification. The movement is lit by a photographer's set built in the shader, with an overhead diffuser, softboxes, strips and black flags, and a CC0 Poly Haven studio HDRI mixed in for the irregularity of a real room.

Noto Serif Display, at hairline weights and its condensed width, reads like an engraver's line. It carries three typographic peaks: M-01, the beat count when the watch starts, and 18. Epilogue sets the reading, the labels and the tabular figures.

The how to build a 3D website guide walks through the same choices for any object. The 3D website examples and product website examples show it beside our other concept sites, and the product launch page use case covers what a launch page needs to sell.

Speed

Measured on 6 October 2026, cold, with an empty cache, on our phone profile: slow 4G (1.6 Mbps down, 150 ms round trip), CPU slowed four times, a 390 × 844 screen.

On a fast connection without the CPU slowdown, the movement was drawn at about 1.0 s. The phone time is long because the movement needs 31 shader programs, down from 43 after a loading pass on the same day, and the slowed CPU waits on each one. The loader shows real progress the whole time, so the screen is never blank. Rendering resolution is capped (2× on desktop, 1.5× on touch screens), the canvas sleeps when nothing 3D is on screen, and everything is released when you leave. Fast websites with 3D explains the trade-offs.

Accessibility

With reduced motion on, there is no smooth scrolling. You get three still movements in their stages, a still flat lay in the parts sheet, and static lenses. Nothing flashes. The Wind control is a real button that works with Enter, Space and the up and right arrow keys. If WebGL is not available, a still frame of the site's own render stands in. See accessible motion for the reasoning.

Provenance and credits

A concept site made by the Laarpi team with Laarpi's library and process. It was not produced end to end by SI, Laarpi's website agent. Sites SI builds on its own carry a "Built by SI" label with their build time and cost.

The shaders, the scene code and the loader were written for this site.

For two more objects you can handle, see PATCH-01, a synth module you can play, and Aster & Kiln, a vase you watch being thrown and fired. To start your own product page from this one, remix it.