With Only a Handful of Monthly Subscriptions, He Open-Sourced 55 3D Lab Courses

A developer working in 3D visualization has open-sourced the interactive 3D educational courses he spent several months building. The reason is straightforward: the monthly subscription orders could be counted on one hand.

The project is called Tongjiang Lab. It currently has 55 courses online, covering physics, chemistry, biology, and geography, and is built according to China's high school curriculum standards and PEP (People's Education Press) textbooks. Ammonia synthesis, sulfuric acid production by the contact process, the chlor-alkali industry, blast furnace ironmaking, the magnetic field of electric current, the photoelectric effect, mitosis, nerve impulses, three-cell circulation, El Niño… these processes that textbooks ask students to imagine have been turned into 3D worlds you can drag, rotate, and cut open to see inside.

Each course looks like this:

• A 3D world that can be rotated and zoomed, and cut open to view internal structures
• A control panel on the right with sliders and switches to adjust parameters; readings and curves update in real time
• A step timeline: the teacher clicks “Next” to teach through a lesson, and steps not performed manually are demonstrated automatically
• The final step is an assessment with target values

A few points the author particularly cares about:

1. Each course is a single HTML file, about 1 MB. Copy it to a USB drive, double-click to open it, and it works offline, on a projector, or on an interactive whiteboard.
2. Traceable numbers. For each course, a fact table is written first. Values from textbooks are marked with page numbers; values set specifically for teaching are labeled “courseware setting” with the rationale stated. Every number in the courseware can be found in the fact table.
3. Downloadable and embeddable in school websites; the course page has a one-click copy embed code.

The production workflow is also public. To save tokens, the author made heavy use of DeepSeek to batch-search textbooks, write fact tables, and build courseware; Claude designed the unified courseware shell and visual guidelines and handled review; image models produced reference images and covers. Each course runs automated checks at three screen sizes, and then a human reviews screenshots step by step; only after passing does it go live. The author says biology courses were the hardest because building the models was very cumbersome.

The author himself says: AI can speed things up, but “being correct and understandable” still depends on repeated review. There are certainly still mistakes among the 55 courses; readers are welcome to click “Report an error” on a course page or open an Issue on GitHub.

A commenter remarked: open-sourcing because subscriptions can't sustain it turns 3D interactive courses from a product into a customer-acquisition entry point. That's an interesting angle.

But there are practical issues too. One user reported that opening one HTML file on a computer with 32 GB of RAM lags; the author replied, “One experiment is just over 1 MB—I'll look into it again.” Someone posted a screenshot pointing out a button labeled “Park” (停车) in the courseware interface, with the caption “I don't recall driving, though.” There are still rough edges in interaction and translation.

Future plans: continue expanding all four subjects with the goal of completing them all, then create courses for middle school and elementary school; release English and other language versions; and write a complete long-form article on the production method.

The courses are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: they can be used, shared, and adapted for free for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to “Tongjiang Lab.”

Online version: lab.tongjiang.app
GitHub: github.com/smithjohn78390/tongjiang-lab

If you know a high school teacher, feel free to pass this along to them.