Maybe it is the amount of shadow-casting items on that page but if your <i></i><i>landing page</i><i></i> maxes out my cpu and lags badly, I say goodbye faster than 20 frames render. (I use Opera.)<p>edit: They do look good though!
This one even had lights.
Illuminated.js – 2D lights and shadows rendering engine for HTML5 applications
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3958251" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3958251</a>
"Perfect for eye-catching demos and landing pages."<p>Can we stop creating stuff in JS/CSS that we would have ridiculed other people for doing in flash? I can't possibly think of any situation where this would be useful for a landing page.
This pegged my duo core at 100% for both cores. Realtime shadows are great and all, but if I needed to achieve them I'd imagine I'd use WebGL if I didn't care about CPU or battery.<p>Using jQuery for this type of problem seems a little out of place to me. That said, this is certainly "neat." THAT said, I don't believe this has real world practical value. Its too computationally expensive considering what it adds.
My company released this effect a couple of months ago: <a href="http://okfoc.us/okshadow/" rel="nofollow">http://okfoc.us/okshadow/</a> and <a href="https://github.com/okfocus/okshadow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/okfocus/okshadow</a>
Just to confirm, it's working well on Chrome 20 on Mac for me (no lag, not maxing out the CPU, very smooth). It's interesting from a technical perspective, although design-wise I can't really see any practical reason to use it. Fun though.
It may just be for demo purposes, but using the mouse cursor as a light source seems like the 2012 equivalent of animated GIF backgrounds. Might be cool it could you specify a point light source at a given coordinate and let the page render from there.