Oxide and Friends: Building the 3D Rack Explorer
Oxide and Friends, Saturday, June 27th, 2026
Oxide designer Ben Leonard explains how the company built its interactive 3D rack explorer web tool.
Oxide designer Ben Leonard discusses building the interactive 3D rack explorer at explorer.oxide.computer, turning mechanical CAD models into a web-based visualization.
The team used Three.js and React Three Fiber to render complex hardware components performantly.
Asset preparation required manually reducing polygon counts while preserving detail like PCB silk screens.
Performance was optimized via GPU tier detection, instancing, and frame rate monitoring, with AI used in testing.
Owning the custom tool lets Oxide extend it for future uses like thermal visualization and console integration.