A second portfolio experiment — an "infinite" 3D neural grid where each work occupies a coordinate in space rather than a row in a list.
The Digital Nexus experimented with a rotating cube as a portfolio interface. Holodeck was the more ambitious follow-up: an entire 3D neural-grid space, where each project lived at a specific 3D coordinate, and navigation through the portfolio meant flying through space toward whatever you wanted to look at.
It's a small piece of spatial UI design — the kind of interface design that doesn't quite belong on most websites but is interesting to explore in case any of it suggests something useful elsewhere.
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What it is
A dual-rendered 3D environment combining a high-performance 3D engine with the browser's standard text rendering. Project content lives in the 3D space — coordinates, focus targets, descriptions that type themselves onto surfaces when you navigate near them. Two modes: free exploration (you can fly anywhere) and focus mode (the camera locks onto whatever project you've selected).
The aesthetic is "spatial computing data terminal" — sparse, glowing, sci-fi-adjacent without being kitsch.
What stayed with me
The technical insight was the value of dual rendering pipelines. Some content is best as a 3D mesh (the grid, the structural elements). Other content is best as flat HTML (the text descriptions, the navigation UI). Combining them — 3D engine for the geometry, regular DOM for the readable text — gave each format its proper role. That hybrid approach showed up in several later projects whenever a 3D scene needed proper text.
The broader observation was that spatial UIs aren't always the right answer. They feel cool. They photograph well. They rarely improve task efficiency over a well-designed flat list. Holodeck was useful for me to build, but it confirmed something I'd suspected: most portfolios are better off as galleries. The spatial framing is a separate genre, not a universal upgrade.
Part of the early experiments — exploring the spatial-UI space and figuring out where it does and doesn't earn its place.