WebGL that earns its weight
A spinning 3D logo is not a strategy. The question is never whether you can render it — it's whether the story is poorer without it.
Open most "immersive" sites and you'll find a 3D object spinning for no reason, eating a phone's battery to prove the studio owns a copy of Three.js. WebGL is the most over-deployed tool in premium web. It's also, used right, the most quietly powerful.
The only question worth asking
Not "can we render this?" — you almost always can. The question is whether the experience is genuinely poorer without it. If the same idea lands as a video, a sequence of stills, or good CSS, then WebGL is just expensive decoration with a power bill attached to it.
Where it earns its place: a resort villa you can actually orbit and walk through, a material whose finish only reads when light moves across it, a map that responds to a hand rather than a click. Things you cannot fake with a flat image because the interaction itself is the point.
Pay for it like it's expensive — because it is
Treat the GPU like a budget, not a playground. We set a hard performance ceiling before a single shader is written: a frame target, a memory limit, a load time we refuse to cross. Lazy-load the canvas so the scene only mounts when it enters view. Ship a graceful still for the device that can't handle it.
If the story survives without the 3D, ship the story. If it doesn't, render only what the story needs.
This matters more than ego allows. A one-second delay can cut conversions by seven percent, and an unoptimised WebGL scene is the fastest way to add three seconds on mobile — where most of your audience already is.
The studios that misuse WebGL want you to know they can do it. The ones that use it well want you to feel something and never notice the machinery. For a property or hospitality brand, that's the whole game: the technology should disappear, and only the place should remain.