Biruni Lab (مختبر البيروني) · a bilingual 3D science lab, from the cosmic web down to the Planck scale

The idea#

Most people never get a feel for how big the universe is or how small an atom is, because both are described with exponents nobody can picture. Biruni Lab, named after the 11th-century polymath al-Biruni, replaces the exponents with a journey: one continuous 3D world you fly through, where every step is a power of ten and every object is real, with the photograph and the data to prove it.

It had to work for an Arabic-speaking student as well as an English-speaking one, run on an ordinary laptop with nothing to install, and stay honest: real NASA, ESA and ESO imagery, real masses and radii, real documentaries, not illustrations.

What I built#

• Two worlds, 61 orders of magnitude apart. The Cosmic Universe runs from the Solar System (10⁷ m) through the stars, the Milky Way, Andromeda and five more galaxies, out to the cosmic web at 10²⁶ m. The Quantum World starts at the periodic table and dives into any of the 118 elements: electron shells, the packed nucleus of protons and neutrons, the quarks inside them, and the vibrating strings of the Planck scale at 10⁻³⁵ m.
• Continuous zoom, not slides. Distances, lighting and orbits rescale smoothly as you travel, so the Solar System and the cosmic web belong to one space instead of five separate screens.
• Real flight controls. Keyboard or arrow keys to fly, Shift to boost, mouse or touch to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, and a speed multiplier from 0.5× precision up to 25× "warp" for the light-years.
• A scientific dossier for every object. Verified telescope photography, mass and radius, elemental breakdown, and direct Google and Wikimedia links. The card can be dragged aside or collapsed into a pill so it never hides the view.
• Science cinema. A short documentary for every scale and every element, curated from NASA, Periodic Videos and Kurzgesagt, with a YouTube fallback.
• Bilingual search. Type a planet, star, galaxy or element in Arabic or English and the camera flies there.
• A sky that matches the date. Pick a date, pause or speed up time, and toggle the constellations.
• Shareable state. The world, the element and the scale live in the URL, so a teacher can link straight to the nucleus of gold or to Andromeda.
• Guided tour and gentle audio, both optional, both remembered.

How#

Next.js on top of Three.js and WebGL, with the two worlds sharing one camera and scale system so switching between them is instant. Object data and imagery come from NASA and Wikimedia sources, the videos are embedded by ID with fallbacks, and the interface is fully bilingual with right-to-left support for Arabic. Solo design and development.

Outcome#

A live, free science explorer that students, teachers and curious people use to feel the scale of the universe instead of reading about it, and a reference build for demanding 3D interfaces on the web: continuous multi-scale rendering, bilingual UI, real-data integration and shareable deep links.