The 3D Cylindrical Carousel is a dynamic and highly flexible component designed to display images or content in a rotating cylindrical layout. It delivers continuous motion, realistic depth perception, and responsive interaction, making it ideal for visually striking galleries, showcases, or presentations.
The component offers both automatic and user-driven interaction. It rotates continuously by default, creating a seamless looping motion around a central axis. Users can manually control the rotation through vertical dragging, with momentum-based physics that maintain movement after release for a natural feel.
During interaction, the carousel can optionally pause its automatic animation, ensuring precise control. Drag sensitivity is fully adjustable, and pointer capture guarantees smooth interaction even beyond the component bounds.
A range of visual enhancements reinforces the 3D illusion. Cards dynamically scale, blur, and darken based on their position in the cylinder, simulating real spatial depth. Subtle gradients and backface fading further enhance perception, while dynamic shadows are cast between cards to create a layered, realistic composition.
Perspective and squash controls allow the cylinder to shift from a perfect circle to a more elliptical form, giving flexibility in how dramatic or subtle the effect feels.
The component is fully responsive, automatically adapting to its container while maintaining proportional scaling. It can calculate its own radius for perfectly aligned cards or allow manual adjustment for more open or compact arrangements.
Card dimensions, spacing, and perspective can all be fine-tuned, ensuring it integrates cleanly into any layout system.
It supports multiple images with flexible input settings, alongside full control over styling such as borders, corner radius, background, shadows, and blur intensity. Animation speed and direction are also configurable, allowing anything from subtle motion to more dynamic rotations.
Optimized for smooth performance, the component leverages GPU-accelerated transforms and efficient animation techniques to maintain high frame rates. It only animates when visible on screen and respects reduced motion preferences.
Accessibility is built in, with proper semantic structure and ARIA support to ensure usability across different contexts.
The carousel positions elements around a virtual cylinder and continuously rotates them along its vertical axis. Visual properties such as scale, opacity, blur, and layering are dynamically adjusted based on each card’s position relative to the viewer, creating a consistent and natural sense of depth while maintaining seamless motion.
Rubén Ortega Díaz
