# 3D Coordinate Space & Meshes

**Track:** 3D, Shaders & AI Intuition — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** three.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Vectors: Magnitude & Direction, Transformations & the Matrix Stack

**In one line:** Place meshes in x, y, z and look at them with a camera.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Three-dimensional graphics begin with a debt to Descartes: every point of form is an address in x, y, z, and a mesh is nothing but a list of such addresses joined into triangles. Nothing is seen until a camera imposes a viewpoint, projecting that coordinate lattice onto a flat image through a view frustum. The aesthetic is one of staged emptiness — a void that becomes architecture the moment vertices are placed and a lens is aimed. Ricardo Cabello's three.js made this stagecraft legible in the browser, descending from Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and the long lineage of computer-graphics pipelines that translate measured space into seen space.