Life Units: countdown timers as a living 3D world
Life Units is a free web app that turns countdown timers into animated 3D voxel objects on a floating island. A pancake stack is nibbled away as days pass, a tree marks the hours, a coffee cup drains by minutes, and an egg hatches into a chick as seconds run out. Urbano DX built and operates it as a public example of consumer-grade 3D craft running in an ordinary browser tab.
Open Life Units
Five live timers on the floating voxel island, each rendered as its own animated object
Creating a timer: five model variants (pancakes, tree, coffee, chick, sugar) and five time units
The stats view: live progress per timer plus daily completion historyWhat it is
Life Units is a free, no-login web app where every countdown timer is a small animated 3D scene. Timers live together on a floating voxel island with drifting clouds, chiptune sound effects, and a pixel-art interface. It is for anyone who wants timers that feel alive instead of a number on a screen.
- Five timer models: pancakes, tree, coffee, chick, and sugar cubes
- Each model visibly depletes as its time runs out
- Seconds to days, plus a custom unit counter
- Free, no account, live at timers.urbanodx.com
What was built
A full-screen react-three-fiber scene with procedural voxel models and a depletion system that maps remaining time directly onto geometry. Timers persist in the browser, so the whole product ships as a static bundle behind nginx with no backend at all.
- Procedural voxel avatars in three.js
- Time-to-geometry animation: objects shrink, drain, and hatch
- Stats view, model picker, and pixel UI chrome
- Stack: Vite, React 19, TypeScript, three.js, react-three-fiber, nginx
What it demonstrates
Consumer-grade 3D rendering, playful product design, and obsessive detail are web skills, not game-engine skills. The same care applies to business software: micro-interactions, performance budgets, and interfaces people actually enjoy using.
- Real-time 3D in a normal browser tab, no install
- Playful design executed with engineering discipline
- Detail and polish as a deliberate habit
- Front-end range beyond dashboards and forms