Boxels

What if 3D scenes lived in the DOM?

2026 · Open Source · Live Demo

What A CSS 3D boxel engine that composes interactive scenes entirely from DOM divs. Textures, boolean operations, edge fusion, per-face styling, click interactions, and animation. Zero dependencies.

Why WebGL and Canvas are powerful but opaque — you leave the DOM behind. What happens when you stay? CSS transforms, backdrop-filter, and border rendering give you a surprisingly capable 3D toolkit with DOM accessibility, event handling, and styling for free.

How Each boxel is a div with six CSS-transformed faces. An edge fusion algorithm culls internal faces between adjacent boxels — a 10x10x10 cube renders 600 faces instead of 6,000. Boolean operations (subtract, intersect, exclude) carve geometry at the grid level before any faces are generated.

Built with Claude Code, hands-free.
An exercise in AI-driven prototyping. Nearly all code is AI-generated, focus was entirely on the idea and creative direction.

Try It

Drag to orbit. Scroll to zoom. Click a boxel to see the interaction feedback. Switch textures to change the material.

Texture:

Photo by Shashwat Goyar on Pexels

Links

GitHub · npm · Live Demo