Compass is a working magnetic compass rendered entirely in WebGL. It reads your device's orientation sensors to point at magnetic north, showing a precise heading in degrees and the cardinal direction you're facing — on a hand-drawn dial that swings smoothly like the real thing.
How it works. Every part of the dial — the graduated ring, the tick marks, the degree numbers, the cardinal letters and the needle — is built from scratch as WebGL geometry, with the text baked into a small glyph atlas so it stays crisp at any size. The app listens to your device's absolute orientation sensor (falling back to relative orientation, or Safari's compass heading on iOS) and corrects for however the screen itself is rotated, then eases the dial toward that heading with a damped spring so the needle settles naturally instead of snapping. When no compass hardware is feeding it — on a desktop, say — it drifts gently in a demo mode, and you can grab the dial and spin it yourself. Because orientation sensors are privacy-sensitive, some devices show an Enable compass button to grant permission first.
How you interact:
- Point — hold the device flat and turn; the dial rotates to keep north fixed while the readout shows your live heading and cardinal direction.
- Enable compass — on devices that ask, tap once to grant sensor permission (the status switches from DEMO to LIVE).
- Drag — with no live sensor connected, drag the dial to spin it by hand.
- Day / Night — toggle the light and dark themes with the button, or the N, D and space keys; it also picks one automatically based on the time of day.
A compact, framework-free compass that works fully offline and falls back gracefully wherever a sensor or WebGL isn't available.