Click shapes below to add them, then drag objects around
Shadow art has fascinated humans for millennia — from ancient hand shadows on cave walls to contemporary shadow sculptures that use everyday objects to cast perfect silhouette images. The interplay of light and form is fundamental to visual storytelling, photography, and stage design, yet few tools let you experiment with shadows interactively in real time.
ShadowBox is an interactive sandbox where you place geometric shapes and light sources on a stage, then watch realistic shadows form on a wall plane in real time. Move objects, reposition lights, change colors and sizes — the shadows update instantly. It is a creative exploration tool for artists, designers, educators, and anyone curious about how light and form interact.
ShadowBox uses ray-casting to compute shadows. For each shape on the stage, the engine traces rays from the light source through the shape vertices, projecting them onto wall and floor planes. The shadow boundary is computed from the projected points. Soft shadows are simulated using Gaussian blur proportional to the light source size. The glow effect around lights uses radial gradient compositing.