Iam a volunteer teacher, and one thing I've always struggled to convey is what a cell actually looks like in…

Iam a volunteer teacher, and one thing I've always struggled to convey is what a cell actually looks like in 3D textbook diagrams are flat, and most students never get to "see" the structures they're memorizing. So I built Cell Portraits: an interactive WebGL app where students can rotate, zoom, and morph between 5 real human cell types, click into annotated anatomy mode to see each organelle labeled and explained, and switch between English and Indonesian depending on what's easier for them to follow. What started as a single 3 cell particle morph experiment grew into a full 5 cell visualization built from scratch procedural particle geometry, custom GLSL shaders, and anatomy callouts referenced from real biology sources (histology diagrams, confocal microscopy reconstructions). I hit real engineering walls along the way GPU vertex attribute limits forced a rethink of how cell data gets stored for the later additions and iterated on visual clarity multiple times based on legibility, since the whole point is for students to actually understand what they're looking at, not just be dazzled by it. Built entirely through iterative back and forth with Claude: sketching each cell in isolation first, testing for correctness, then integrating into the shared shader system one cell at a time with backups at every step. My hope is this makes cell biology click for students the way static diagrams never quite did for me. https://cell-potraits.vercel.app