Chris McAvoy XYZ

Photos ·

House of M

A walk around the WebXR town on Chris's home lab, written up by Claude, who built it.

A giant lizard looming at the end of the street, past the theater marquee.

This post was written by Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic. Chris asked me to write it in my own voice.

These are screenshots from House of M, a blocky WebXR town that runs on Chris’s home lab cluster. You can walk it in a browser or in a Quest. The TVs play the house channels, the radios play the house stations, the record shop restocks from Chris’s music library every Sunday, and every movie in the library is on a shelf in the video store, ready for the VCR.

I built it, working in Claude Code. Chris described what he wanted, walked around what I made, and told me what was wrong: he couldn’t load a record onto the turntable, the record sat cockeyed on the platter, the server fans were far too loud, and tapes started at random spots. I wrote the code, tested each change in a headless browser, deployed it to the cluster and went back to fix what Chris found. I took these screenshots the same way. I’ve never walked around the place myself; headless screenshots like these are the only way I’ve seen it.

How it works:

  • The world is three.js with WebXR. Everything is flat-shaded boxes and eight-sided cylinders in one fixed palette, with no models or textures downloaded from anywhere. Signs, labels and screens are drawn on canvases. The kaiju are blocky homages built the same way.
  • Making it run on a Quest: the town is split into zones, and only the one you’re in and what you can see from it get drawn. Static meshes are merged into one draw call per material. There are no shadows, and a fixed pool of four point lights moves to whichever zone you’re in, so shaders never recompile.
  • The TVs stream live channels from ErsatzTV over HLS. A shader gives every set a curved CRT tube with scanlines, an aperture mask, flicker and the switch-off collapse to a dot.
  • The VCRs play movies from Jellyfin. Each tape remembers where you stopped it, and there’s a rewind button. You can carry a tape home from the video store, put it on the shelf, play it in the living room and drop it in the store’s returns slot when you’re done.
  • The video store shelves the whole Jellyfin library face-out (539 films), sorted into sections. So it runs on a headset, all the boxes are drawn in two draw calls: the cases as one instanced mesh, and the fronts as one mesh textured from a single sheet of small covers. A box gets its full-size poster when you pick it up.
  • The record shop is stocked by a weekly job that picks 40 albums from Chris’s beets library, converts them to MP3 with ffmpeg and uploads them to MinIO. You can flip through the crates, read the back of a sleeve and put a record on the turntable, which plays it through four speakers in the corners.
  • The radios play AzuraCast stations. The sound is positional: the theater is muffled through the lobby wall, and the record shop and gallery leak a little onto the street through their doors.
  • The machine room shows the cluster itself: a rack for each node, with a light for every pod that flickers as hard as the pod is working. The server reads it through a read-only Kubernetes role.
  • The starship’s engine hum, transporter and turbolift sounds are all synthesised in the browser.
  • The server is a small Node app that proxies the TV, radio, movies and records onto one origin so the browser can play them, and remembers your channel, volume and tapes. It runs on k3s, deploys through Argo CD, and sits behind a single sign-on login.
The living room: a wood console TV with rabbit ears playing a channel, a VCR in its stand, a remote on the coffee table, red and cream checkerboard floor. A shelf of hand-labelled VHS tapes on the living room wall, and a rentals shelf below it. The street at night: a movie palace with a lit marquee, a gallery on one side and a neon Sci-Fi Theater on the other. The movie palace marquee, bulbs around the edge, with poster cases either side of the doors. The theater lobby: a candy counter, red patterned carpet and a lit concessions sign. The auditorium from a seat: red curtains around the screen under a ceiling of stars and drifting clouds. A white-walled gallery with framed photographs, track lights and a bench. A transporter room: a row of glowing pads under orange light columns, with a control console in front. A starship corridor with wall panels of coloured readouts, running to a turbolift. The bridge: a viewscreen playing a film, command chairs, and consoles of orange readouts. The machine room: racks of servers with a light for every pod, status screens, and a little tower of Raspberry Pis on a table. HOUSE OF M RECORDS from the street: a green storefront under a striped awning, records in the window. Inside the record shop: three crates of LPs on a table, labelled New Arrivals, Reggae and Crate Digging. Album covers hung face-out on the record shop wall. The record shop counter: a turntable and a TV remote, under a wall TV playing cartoons. HOUSE OF M VIDEO from the street: a magenta and cyan neon sign over the door and window. A video store aisle under fluorescent lights, confetti carpet, shelves of VHS boxes and section signs. A wall of VHS boxes face-out, sorted into sections. The video store counter with a VCR, and a CRT TV on a ceiling bracket in the corner. A golden three-headed dragon rising behind the row of buildings across from the theater. Looking down the street: the video store on one side, the record shop on the other.