Spine is now running on a real prototype display

This is a big moment.

After months of developing Spine, from paper prototypes to figure out the right proportions, to countless iterations of software on my Mac, we now have it running on an actual bar-format display.

The hardest part was getting it to run perfectly smooth on the display and Pi stack. It required a full rebuild of the rendering layer in WebGL. The previous implementation handled most things fine but started to drop frames under load, and 60fps matters to me in a way that probably sounds disproportionate if you're not a gamer. I just could not settle for anything less than pure smoothness.

It's part of what Spine is supposed to feel like, and once you've seen it running cleanly it's impossible to accept anything less. The WebGL switch fixed it. Scrolling through a full library now feels exactly as it should.

Important caveat: what you see in the video is a development rig, not the finished product. Display and Raspberry Pi 5, nothing more. There's no anti-glare coating on the glass yet, so the screen still feels a bit too much like a screen.

The industrial design work with Aetha is running as a separate stream and will look nothing like this. Expect something that makes you proud to hang on your wall, that behaves flawlessly and doesn't feel like a gadget. But the software behaviour visible here, the rendering, the scrolling, the cover art loading, the tap to play, that's what ships.