Most websites are designed to be scrolled through. But what if you could actually walk around inside one?
That was the idea behind one of my favorite experiments: turning my personal website into a fully explorable 3D environment. What started as a fun side project eventually grew into something much bigger, including an entire collection of interactive worlds, games, and experiments.
If you have a few minutes to spare, I'd love to show you around.
The home office
The first stop is my home office, recreated as a cozy little 3D environment (opens in a new tab). You'll find me standing at my desk with a cat sleeping nearby.
There's nothing particularly grand about it, and that's (hopefully) part of the charm.
The original gallery
This is where the whole adventure began.
Before SceneXP existed, I decided to turn devSteve into a place you could physically explore. Instead of navigating through menus and scrolling through pages, visitors could wander around a virtual gallery, with the website's content hanging on the walls like artwork.
But building an ordinary gallery wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.
Step outside and you'll find a little neighborhood, complete with a café, a bookstore, a hot dog cart, and a few characters going about their business. The sun moves across the sky, shadows grow longer, and eventually night falls.
And that's when things get a little weird.
There are plenty of small details to discover. You can switch off the gallery lights, look through a telescope to watch a comet pass overhead, or inspect a whiteboard full of engineering sketches. Some surprises are obvious. Others take a little exploring.
There's even a treasure hunt with nine hidden discoveries and a leaderboard for anyone determined enough to find them all.
None of this was particularly necessary for a personal portfolio. But that's what made it so much fun to build.
Click here to explore the gallery.
How they were built
Both experiences were built with Three.js (opens in a new tab) and JavaScript, rendering directly in the browser using WebGL. There's no heavyweight application framework behind them, and the original gallery even supports WebXR for exploring in virtual reality.
But the technology itself is only part of the story.
What made these projects especially interesting was the way I built them.
Rather than manually writing thousands of lines of geometry, animation, and interaction code, I worked alongside Claude Code, describing what I wanted to create, exploring the results, identifying problems, and refining the experience through iteration.
It's a different approach to software development, but one I've come to really enjoy. My focus shifts toward the experience itself: what should happen, how it should feel, what could go wrong, and whether the finished result actually works.
Of course, building something that looks interesting is only the beginning. It also needs to run smoothly, behave predictably, and work across different devices.
As the projects grew, I started extracting reusable components into a shared library of environments, furniture, characters, lighting, interactions, and movement controls. That foundation eventually became part of SceneXP, making it possible to create entirely new experiences in a fraction of the time.
Performance and accessibility were important considerations, too. The scenes adapt their rendering resolution, limit expensive shadow updates, and respect reduced-motion preferences.
What originally began as an experiment in building a more interesting personal website became an exploration of something much bigger: how quickly one engineer, working with AI, can turn an idea into a complete interactive experience.