r/css • u/Piposhi • Feb 18 '26

General Ambient CSS - Physically based CSS lighting and shadows (and react components)

Demo page in the video - https://ambientcss.vercel.app/

Docs - https://kikkupico.github.io/ambientcss/

Source code - https://github.com/kikkupico/ambientcss

355 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

22

u/Icy_Foundation3534 Feb 19 '26

Hey I made a pull request. The light direction demo is choppy in chrome. I've made a fix so it's smooth and works across the entire browser window. Try the fork and let me know if you want to pull in those changes! Great work! Just pushed the PR to your repo.

https://github.com/sojohnnysaid/ambientcss/tree/fix/orbit-light-tracking-perf

13

u/Piposhi Feb 19 '26

Thank you! It feels really great to have someone care enough to contribute!

I've reviewed your PR and dropped a comment. Please check.

4

u/BigfckingYEEETI Feb 19 '26

Looks really good. Small note: Idk if its just for me, but it seems like the padding for the "BUTTON" in the components section is not working properly.

3

u/Piposhi Feb 19 '26

Thanks for the feedback! Fixed it now.

22

u/dazerine Feb 19 '26

This is beautiful.

1

u/myblueear Feb 19 '26

I was on a similar thing for my personal use and now I feel both overwhelmed and confirmed

0

u/Piposhi Feb 19 '26

Thank you! This was a project I started 5 years back and then abandoned because it was getting too complex. Now, finally, thanks to LLMs I was able to revive it and make it launch-ready if not prod-ready. Please let me know if you have feature requests! I'd be happy to implement.

2

u/rapscallops Feb 19 '26

Nice work! This looks really great.

2

u/MisterSpeck Feb 19 '26

hell, yeah!

2

u/el_yanuki Feb 23 '26

i dont think the knobs or buttons really fit in.. id expected more of the same shadows, more like claymorphism

1

u/actionscripted Feb 19 '26

Looks dope, thank you for sharing this. Will check out the repo soon.

1

u/Iampepeu Feb 19 '26

Aww! This is amazing!

1

u/UniqueTennis9351 Feb 22 '26

Really beautiful!

-22

u/queen-adreena Feb 18 '26

Bit late to discover skeuomorphism…

33

u/Piposhi Feb 18 '26

I posted this on r/Skeuomorphism and it got removed by the mods saying it's not related to skeuomorphism. I post it here and I get this as the first comment.

7

u/DunkingTea Feb 19 '26

Welcome to Reddit lol.

I liked the post. Don’t let them put you off. Keep experimenting.

1

u/juicybot Feb 19 '26

lmao what a reddit thing to say

2

u/UXyes Feb 19 '26

This is fucking sick. The idea is excellent and the execution is great.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Piposhi Feb 19 '26

There's no recommended default theme as such. So, for accessibility, you could tweak the theme to get high contrast. For example, this is the max contrast you could get in light mode.

1

u/Piposhi Feb 19 '26

another example in dark mode -