15 years ago I thought this type of thing would be the future of education. Is the educational system anything like this nowadays or are kids still more or less still stuck with static textbooks?

This is edutainment. Kind of like YouTube channels like 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium or MinutePhysics. All good, it helps build intuition, and to better understand the world, but it is a bit lacking for actually using that knowledge.

Notice how few equations there are in this page, it is a common feature of edutainment, they won't give you equations unless they can't get away without. No linear algebra here, just a cosine (actually a dot product in disguise) and the inverse square law (1/r²), two equations he considered too fundamental to skip. Also notable is the lack of exercises.

But now that you have read this page, and played with the interactive elements, you probably have a good understanding of how lights and shadows work, but can you write a 3D engine or even just calculate exposure time without your camera helping you? Without prior knowledge, probably not. For that, you actually need to do the maths, with exercises and all that. And by the way, look at the source code (it is not obfuscated), all the linear algebra that is not present in the article is there!

That, I think, explain the discrepancy between edutainment and textbooks. Textbooks are for you to do actual work, do the maths, solve problems, etc... not just give you an overview. That's also why is takes way longer and requires a lot more effort on the student part.

Interactive content like this one is good, and maybe it should be given a bit more consideration by the traditional educational system. But I don't think it can replace textbooks, at least not for the "hard part".

It seems most digital attempts aren't done properly, thus it tends to end back to books.

A recent example,

https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20260106-back-to-...

There is the “tools for thought” space I came across where some work felt compelling for computer enabled teaching and learning.

Bret Victor [0], Andy Matuschak [1], and Seymour Papert [2] to point to a few names.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUaOucZRlmE

[1]https://quantum.country/

[2]https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mindstorms/nDjRDwAAQBAJ...

School incentives are not really aligned around maximizing learning rate for every student. (E.g. that is why there is/was debate around teaching phonetics)

Maybe someone with first-hand experience can weight in, but isn't this what alternative education platforms like "Brilliant" look like?