Firewood Splitting Simulator: a 3D browser toy made from a real yard

The Firewood Splitting Simulator is a small interactive page on screen.toys, a collection of browser toys by the artist and visual developer Gavin Shapiro, who publishes as shapiro500. The page describes itself as “an interactive Three.js experience”: a 3D scene rendered directly in the browser tab, with no download, no account and no installation.

Drag, click, split

The toy loads a set of 3D assets behind a progress bar, then hands control to the visitor. Dragging rotates the camera around the stump, a click delivers the split, and the finished pieces are stacked automatically. The interface is deliberately thin: the on-screen hint says only “drag to rotate” and “click to split”.

Scanned from a real stump and axe

The virtual log is not a generic asset. In the screen.toys index, Shapiro describes the toy as a way to “see what it's like to split wood in my yard on my actual stump with my actual axe”, and the listing for the companion iOS version says he 3D-scanned the real stump, axe and firewood and recorded the axe motions and the sounds of splitting. The result is a simulation of one specific place rather than of the activity in general.

One page in a small collection

screen.toys gathers a handful of similar experiments by the same author: Spooky Bones, Splitshift, Chess 2, Road trip, Poms and Five Penguins, along with a VJ tool. Each is a single interactive page. The firewood page also links to an iOS version of the toy, listed as free to play with no ads and an optional one-time purchase that unlocks leaderboards, achievements and a running pile of everything the player has split.

Why it matters

The project is a useful illustration of how cheap browser 3D has become. A scanned physical object, a single interaction and a recorded sound are enough to carry a page, and the whole thing runs from a static site. Toys like this rarely change an industry, but they show how little it now takes to turn a physical routine into something a stranger will spend a few minutes with.