Packaging is usually designed at a distance. A customer describes a box, somebody else draws it, and days later a PDF comes back that may or may not match the box in the customer’s head. Pakko IDP closes that distance to zero: the die-cut box lives in the browser, and the customer is the one holding the controls.
Pakko, the Brisbane packaging outfit where the subject has been observed daily since 2023, already had the rest of the pipeline on record — a storefront (Exhibit B) and a quoting engine that turns specs into priced orders (Exhibit C). What the operation lacked was a way for a customer to seethe thing they were speccing. Flat drawings don’t fold. Photographs show someone else’s box. The missing piece had to be three-dimensional, live, and fast enough to feel like handling stock rather than waiting on software.
The desk can confirm React Three Fiber at the scene. The platform runs a Three.js scene managed through React’s component model — the box is a component tree, its panels and folds re-rendering as declaratively as any form on this page. Dimensions, board and style are adjusted from a Material UI control surface, and the geometry rebuilds in real time while the camera stays in the customer’s hand.
“The customer isn’t reading a spec sheet — they’re turning the box over in their hands.”
Underneath, the evidence trail is familiar for anyone who has read this paper’s other exhibits: Supabase holds the data, AWS Amplify handles files and hosting. Designs persist, artwork uploads land on S3-backed storage, and the configurator’s output flows toward the same pipeline the quoting engine prices.
The hard part, as ever with 3D in the browser, was keeping it smooth on ordinary hardware. Sixty frames a second leaves no budget for careless re-renders, so the interactive path leans on refs and memoised geometry rather than state churn — the same discipline, it must be noted, found in the cold-open of this very broadsheet. The desk considers that a matching set of fingerprints.
The platform is in production at idp.pakko.com.au, taking its place in the chain from storefront to quote to design. The investigation finds the subject proficient in the third dimension — and recommends the reader inspect the evidence firsthand.