A 3D chessboard sandbox with optional WebGPU path tracing

Show HN: A 3D chessboard sandbox with optional WebGPU path tracing

A 3D chessboard sandbox with optional WebGPU path tracing is active in the show hn launch space.

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I wanted to explore GPU ray tracing, so I built a free chess board that feels like playing at a café in real life.The goal was over-the-board (OTB) realism. It’s a physics-based sandbox where you manually drag pieces, move the rook for castling, and clear captured pieces yourself. You can even knock them over. The original idea came from my friend, Drew Olbrich (lunarskydiving.com), who built an SGI-based version of this concept at PDI in the '90s.I spent three decades writing rendering code at PDI/DreamWorks and NVIDIA. I wrote the rendering pipeline from scratch in WebGPU. It defaults to an optimized rasterized "fast path" but if you have a good GPU, you can enable a real-time path tracer

Within the show hn launch space, the company focuses on its core offering rather than a broad product line.

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Website: chessboard3d.app