The 3D Kidney Explorer
A kidney you can hold. Spin it, slice it open, tap its parts, and push its physiology around with three dials — while GFR, creatinine, and urine output respond live. Nothing here is your data; it’s a teaching model you can play with freely.
Growing a kidney…
Works best in a modern browser with WebGL. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, tap a structure to learn about it.
Inside: one nephron
The kidney above holds about a million of these. Blood is squeezed through the red filter, and the gold filtrate rides the tubing — water slips back out in blue, salt is pumped out in green, and whatever is left drips down the collecting duct as urine. Turn up the ADH dial and watch the urine darken; drop a loop diuretic on it and watch the salt pumps stall. Or press Ride the drop and make the trip yourself, first person.
Unrolling a nephron…
Tap any segment of the tubing — the glomerulus, the loop of Henle, the collecting duct — for the plain-language or med-student story.
Things to try
- Spin it around
- Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. The red pipe is blood arriving, the blue pipe is clean blood leaving, and the gold tube is urine heading for the bladder.
- Tap any part
- Every structure is clickable — the cortex, the pyramids, the pelvis, the vessels, the ureter. Each card explains itself twice: once in plain language, once at med-student depth. Flip between them.
- Open the cutaway
- Slice the kidney open and see what's inside: the fan of renal pyramids draining into the golden pelvis, exactly the cross-section from an anatomy textbook — except this one is running.
- Move the dials
- Blood pressure, hydration, and kidney health drive a live physiology model. Drop hydration and watch the urine stream thin out. Drop kidney health and watch GFR fall and creatinine climb through the CKD stages.
- Then zoom into a nephron
- Below the kidney is one of its million filters, unrolled. Follow a drop of filtrate through the loop of Henle, crank the ADH dial to concentrate the urine, or switch on a loop diuretic and watch the salt pumps stop.
- Ride the drop
- The roller coaster. Press play and become a red blood cell: fly in through the renal artery, get squeezed through the filter, dive the loop of Henle first-person, and leave as a drop of urine — captions narrate the whole trip.
Want the full physiology?
This explorer is about the anatomy — where things are and what they do. Its sibling, the Kidney Simulator, goes deep on the numbers: arterioles, autoregulation, the drug cabinet, and the full KDIGO grid. They’re better together — learn the map here, then go drive the machine.
This is a simplified teaching model, not a diagnostic tool. It cannot tell you anything about your own kidneys. For that, see how to read your kidney lab results and talk to your care team.
Related reading
These guides cover the next questions patients usually have after this topic.