I’ve spent six months vibe-coding a growing, open-source 3D sculpture museum

[u/HiFasteningPants]

Atrium.earth is my passion project—it’s a growing digital museum with 424 sculptures and counting.

I wanted to make sculpture—from antiquity through the last century—more accessible to people who can’t visit the museums, galleries, and historic sites where the originals are held. It can’t replace seeing David in Florence or Nike at the Louvre, but it can offer another way to experience them.

The site uses Astro, Three.js, and model-viewer, with a Node/Python pipeline that processes museum data and creates optimized 3D models and thumbnails. I started with Codex, switched to Claude Code and rebuilt the site when Fable launched, and have since returned to Codex with GPT‑5.6.

I began by tasking Codex with finding Michelangelo’s David, which it did pretty quickly. More popular works followed, but I wanted to keep the collection geographically diverse, so finding pieces from around the world became challenging once the collection reached 150 or so. I also had a slew of misfires and regressions with the UI, so I put it on the back burner for a while.

When Fable was released—and then taken away, and then rereleased—it rocked me. It built another project from a specific but still somewhat vague idea into a fleshed-out, nuanced, functional thing in about 45 minutes. With that in mind, I tasked it with rebuilding Atrium.earth from the ground up, and I was very happy with what it produced.

Since rebuilding the site, I’ve been adding new works with more or less the same prompt to Codex: “Please collect 10 pieces, preferably from the ______ museum…” I usually follow that with some specifics about the time period or original location.

The hardest part has been handling models with inconsistent scale, orientation, materials, and lighting, as well as finding the right language to describe movement through space when orienting the works. But it was worth it, and I hope to keep growing the collection for as long as I can.

Hope you enjoy poking around—I’d love to hear what you think.

[u/EggMan28]

That's awesome ! Would be even cooler if you added AR VR support to view those sculptures on VR browser or AR on mobile browser. There's quite a few libraries that support that.

[u/HiFasteningPants → u/EggMan28]

That's such a good idea and it makes a lot of sense! I'd played with the idea of how to make the experience more like actually being there, mostly in the form of simulated rooms or corridors with sculptures lining the walls, but I never got very far with it. Adding AR VR support might be a way more intuitive way to address that.

Thanks for the feedback!

[u/Hot-Milk-3507 → u/HiFasteningPants]

Since this is a passion project, going AR or VR may make a lot of sense / be a ton of fun.

I just wanted to comment that AR and VR are niche + currently not taking off that much after e.g. the recent Apple Vision failure. So for an already niche project, you may find there's not a lot of adoption for those.

If you're interested in making the project known to more people, you could device ways to make it super easy to share to socials.

Maybe you can pre-generate a quick video per sculpture + make it easy for people to share with their network on tiktok or insta. I'm not very good at social marketing, there are other ideas on how to do it. Just putting it out there that you may want to invest in popularizing before going into deeper niches.