Pelican riding a bicycle in Three.js to celebrate the Opus 5.5 launch (Addy Osmani, X video)

Summary
Presented by Addy Osmani, this video showcases a real-time 3D WebGL/Three.js game and cinematic demo created to celebrate Anthropic's release of Claude Opus 5.5. The project features a fully modeled and animated pelican riding a bicycle through a procedurally generated city and coastal promenade, collecting fish while dodging traffic.

What is shown

• [00:00] An opening shot of a framed 2D line drawing of a pelican riding a bicycle labeled "Opus 5" mounted on an easel.
• [00:04] Camera pulls back to show the framed picture resting in the handlebar basket of a 3D pelican riding a bicycle along a pier.
• [00:09] An aerial establishing flyover of a 3D city with the title: "PELICAN: A RIDE WITH OPUS 5.5".
• [00:15] Third-person and tracking shots of the pelican pedaling down avenues with moving cars, streetlights, and trees, including a close-up of the bicycle chain and pedals [00:20].
• [00:23] Gameplay HUD appearing with a fish collection objective counter (0 / 15 progressing up to 11 / 15) and a digital speedometer reading 21–27 KM/H.
• [00:33] The pelican enters a public plaza, scattering a flock of pigeons, before hitting a ramp in slow motion ([00:36], marked "SLOW MOTION") and catching air with its beak open.
• [00:46] Top-down bird’s-eye perspective tracking the pelican through intersections and sidewalks.
• [01:04] Scenic approach toward the seaside boardwalk at golden hour, cruising past traffic onto an ocean pier.
• [01:30] Final panoramic aerial view with concluding on-screen text: "PELICAN / 15 FISH CAUGHT • EVERY MODEL, TEXTURE AND SOUND MADE IN CODE".

Claims & numbers

• 15 fish caught: 15 target collectibles in the mini-game loop, as displayed in the final title card [01:30].
• 100% code-generated: The closing screen states that "EVERY MODEL, TEXTURE AND SOUND MADE IN CODE" [01:30].
• Speedometer telemetry in the HUD peaks between 21 and 27 km/h during city street riding [00:23–00:58].

Notable quotes

• [00:10]: "PELICAN / A RIDE WITH OPUS 5.5"
• [00:36]: "SLOW MOTION"
• [01:30]: "15 FISH CAUGHT • EVERY MODEL, TEXTURE AND SOUND MADE IN CODE"

Assessment
This is a technical creative demo and showcase piece demonstrating the coding and procedural generation capabilities of Claude Opus 5.5. The entire scene, 3D meshes, shaders, animation logic, and procedural music are rendered programmatically in code using Three.js and the Web Audio API without pre-baked external asset files.

Lyrics & themes

• Instrumental: There are no vocal lyrics. The soundtrack is an upbeat, whimsical, chamber-orchestra waltz featuring staccato strings, piano, and playful woodwinds, mirroring classic video game adventure tracks.
• Theme: Celebrates the evolution of code generation from simple 2D SVGs into rich, interactive, procedural 3D worlds.

Lore & references

• "Pelican riding a bicycle": A classic community prompt and benchmark originally made famous during the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, where users tested code-generation reasoning by asking models to write an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.
• "Opus 5" plaque: The framed picture on the bicycle basket labeled "Opus 5" displays a flat 2D vector drawing of the pelican, symbolizing the previous generation, before transitioning into the fully realized 3D procedural simulation enabled by Opus 5.5.

Visual style & craft

• Visual Style: Clean, stylized low-to-mid-poly 3D graphics rendered with Three.js WebGL shaders, warm golden-hour directional lighting, procedural bloom, and soft shadows.
• Craft: Entirely scripted and generated in JavaScript/Three.js code. The models (pelican anatomy, bicycle frame, rigging, procedural building geometries, tree foliage), physics/pedaling kinematics, camera choreography, and procedural Web Audio soundtrack were synthesized through Claude Opus 5.5 code prompts.

Described by gemini-3.8-flash on 2026-10-05 from the video's audio and frames.