The 3D Kidney Explorer
A kidney you can hold. Spin it, slice it open, tap its parts, push its physiology around with dials — then shrink down into a single nephron and drive a school bus through it. One scene, two scales. Nothing here is your data; it’s a teaching model you can play with freely.
Warming up the bus…
Works best in a modern browser with WebGL. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, tap a structure to learn about it — or take the bus.
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.
- Zoom into a nephron
- Tap 🔬 and the view flashes down to one of the kidney's 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 arteriole, get squeezed through the filter, dive the loop of Henle first-person, and leave as a drop of urine — captions narrate the whole trip.
- Take the Magic Bus tour
- The field trip. Drive a little yellow school bus up the renal artery, through the kidney's front door, then hold FORWARD to shrink down into a single nephron and drive the tubule yourself — hauling water, sugar, and salt back to the blood along the way. Forward, reverse, your pace.
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.