Boxels
What if 3D scenes lived in the DOM?
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.
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.
Photo by Shashwat Goyar on Pexels