Conway's Game of Life has been simulated to death in 2D. Vladimir Beloborodov has been watching grids of pixels blink since he wrote his first simulator in BASIC as a kid. His Game of 3D Life finally scratches the itch: what happens when you extrude the whole thing into space? Clusters of cells bloom and collapse like slow-motion fireworks made of voxels.

The technical choices are deliberate. With WebGL, you could render a 3D simulation, but the simulation still ran on the CPU. WebGPU changes that. Both the cellular automaton logic and rendering now run entirely on the GPU via compute shaders, with instanced rendering handling hundreds of thousands of cubes. Vladimir built it without external frameworks, just vanilla JavaScript and the raw WebGPU API. Workgroup sizes adapt to device limits at runtime, and queue pacing prevents GPU buildup on slower hardware.

Enable "Screen show" mode and the camera drifts through evolving structures on 15 to 20 second passes with fade transitions. Turn on lantern lighting and the cells flicker with subtle emissive glow. The source is on GitHub under Apache 2.0. Vladimir wrote up the full backstory on LinkedIn if you want to know how Claude and ChatGPT helped build it.

Poke around Help for presets, or just let it run. Sometimes the best way to understand a system is to watch it live (and die) a few thousand times.