When a client asked for that “Apple-style” scroll effect, the answer used to be GSAP or ScrollMagic, and nobody argued about the 50KB of JavaScript that came with it. Scroll-driven animation APIs changed that. This is how I rebuild the Apple Vision Pro animation in CSS with no scripting at all.
The performance bottleneck, and why native matters
In 14 years of WordPress work I have watched plenty of sites get buried under shiny little scripts. A scroll listener in JavaScript competes with the browser main thread, so the moment that thread is busy with a heavy plugin or a race condition in checkout, the animation stutters. Doing the Apple Vision Pro animation in CSS hands the work to the compositor thread instead, which helps on mobile and for accessibility.
The view-timeline property fires an animation exactly when an element enters the viewport. I went into that approach in more depth in CSS scroll-driven animations instead of 50KB of JavaScript.
Stage 1: hardware “explosion” with CSS grid
The Apple site raises three components one after another. The first instinct is position: absolute, and it is the wrong one. Absolute positioning pulls the elements out of flow, and every responsive calculation after that turns into guesswork. Use display: grid and put all the components in the same grid area. They stay stacked, and the parent keeps its height, which position: sticky needs.
/* The bbioon_vision_stack logic */
.vision-container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
align-items: end;
position: sticky;
top: 0;
height: 100vh;
}
.part {
grid-area: 1 / 1; /* All parts share the same cell */
transition: transform 0.3s ease-out;
animation: bbioon_explode linear forwards;
animation-timeline: view();
animation-range: contain 10% contain 50%;
}
@keyframes bbioon_explode {
from { transform: translateY(0) scale(1); }
to { transform: translateY(-25vh) scale(1.1); }
}Stage 2: the flip-up hack
In the second stage the device flips up to show the eyepieces. Apple does that with video plus JavaScript. CSS cannot drive video frame rates yet, so the workaround is a flip-book of background images. The network tab looks ugly, but the animation itself stays CSS only.
That means shipping 60 or more optimized JPGs. Preload them in the document head, or the first scroll stutters: the browser goes to fetch each frame at the moment the scroll timeline reaches it, and you get a blank flicker.
<!-- Preload in your header.php or via wp_head hook -->
<link rel="preload" as="image" href="frame-001.jpg">
<link rel="preload" as="image" href="frame-002.jpg">The gotchas: Firefox and math
Firefox does not support view-timeline yet, so a dev-heavy audience needs a fallback. Responsiveness also takes a little algebra. The components translate by viewport height, so calc() is what keeps them on screen on shorter laptops.
animation-range: contain cover; has been the safest setting for me. The animation starts only once the container is fully in view, and it runs until the container has nearly left. The MDN documentation on animation-range lists all the offsets.
If this kind of scroll work is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I have been working with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Takeaway: future-proofing your themes
The reason to build the Apple Vision Pro animation in CSS is stability. A theme that leans on native APIs like view() and scroll() does not break when a third-party JS library ships a major version bump. There is less code to maintain, and it runs faster.
