Zexpo is the always-on 3D business world that never closes.

Most virtual events are a webpage with a video on it. Zexpo adds the missing axis. An organizer draws their show in a top - down plan editor — halls, aisles, stand sizes, signage — and the platform generates a low-poly 3D venue out of that same data: a place with a floor, a route through it, and a stall number on every stand. Exhibitors take a space, dress it in their own brand, and meet visitors there by chat, voice or scheduled call. Visitors walk in as an avatar, in a browser, from any timezone.

It works three ways: as a digital twin running alongside a physical show, as a fully virtual event with no venue to rent, and as a hybrid QR handshake that lets a real-world conversation carry on digitally after the queue moves.

Built in-house at Xeontrix on Vue 3, Three.js and Supabase. Public launch 1 January 2027 at zexpo.world.

The brief

The virtual-event category had collapsed into a single shape: a schedule, a video player, and a directory of logos. It solved broadcast and abandoned the one thing an exhibition is actually for — walking a floor, being surprised by a stand you weren't looking for, and standing in front of someone.

On the other side of the market sat virtual offices: persistent and spatial, but built for staff, not for trade. Nothing occupied the space between — a permanent, addressable place where organizations exhibit and meet, open every hour of every timezone, that a visitor enters through a URL rather than a flight.

Zexpo was built for that gap. The name carries the thesis: Z is the Z-axis, the dimension a flat expo throws away. It also carries the parent brand's DNA, since Xeon is said Zeon. Same family, one letter.

The model

Zexpo doesn't ask the exhibition industry to change how it trades. Organizers subscribe to the platform. Exhibitors buy stands from the organizer, in packages, exactly as they do at a physical show. Visitors get in free.

Organizer — owns the show. Designs the venue, sets stand inventory and pricing, approves exhibitors, runs registration, reads the analytics. The paying customer.
Exhibitor — takes a stand inside an event, dresses it with logo, banners, brochures, video and a welcome message, staffs it, and collects the leads and meetings it produces.
Visitor — registers, picks an avatar, walks in. Browses stands, chats, books meetings, saves contacts, and leaves with a record of who they met.
Platform admin — Xeontrix's own control plane: organizer onboarding, subscription tiers, the venue catalog, feature switches, moderation, health.

Stand features are gated by the package the exhibitor bought. Basic gets a logo, a description, a brochure and text chat; Standard adds video, a spoken welcome and meeting booking; Premium adds live audio-video, per-asset analytics and priority placement. The tier isn't a label on the invoice — it's enforced in the product.

What we built

The 3D was never the risk. The risk was every seam around it: the plan becoming a place, the place staying inside its own event, and the person standing in it being someone you can actually talk to.

A drawing that compiles into a world

The organizer's editor is a plain top-down canvas — rectangles, aisles, stand numbers. What it writes is a layout document, and a generator turns that document into a 3D scene: floors, walls, hall dividers, stand shells from a kit of low-poly templates, fascia signs, stall plates, banners as textures. Change the plan, walk the change. The 2D map visitors use for wayfinding is drawn from the same document, so the map can never disagree with the building.

Every row belongs to an event

Unlike a single global marketplace, Zexpo runs many shows at once for competing organizers. So one rule sits under the whole schema: every stand, listing, registration, thread, meeting, lead and analytic carries its event ID, every query filters on it, and row-level security enforces it in the database rather than in the browser. Getting that wrong doesn't produce a bug — it produces one organizer reading another's exhibitor list.

Other people, at 15 frames a second

A venue with one person in it is a screensaver. Movement is published as deltas at 15 Hz with dead zones and centimetre rounding on the wire, then interpolated on the receiving side. Every packet carries an instance ID from day one, so when a hall outgrows a single shared world and has to shard, nothing above the transport needs rewriting.

An avatar built from one photograph

A separate pipeline fits a head to a single portrait: 478 facial landmarks, a parametric head model solved by regularized least squares, the photo baked and de-lit into the head's own texture map, hair fitted on top. Regularization is physical rather than tuned — stiffness derives from measured noise and is scaled by face size, so a 4000-pixel portrait and a 600-pixel one behave identically. Landmark correspondence error came down from 10.27 mm to 1.87 mm.

A stand that answers when nobody's standing in IT

Stand chat opens with an AI given only that exhibitor's own profile and published exhibits, and told to invent nothing. When a visitor asks for a human, the thread escalates, one email goes out, and the first human reply silences the bot permanently. Whether you're talking to a person or a machine is stamped on every message — and it's a database constraint, not a UI convention, because the honest version has to be the only version the schema will store.

Builder to database to visitor, before anything else

Four days in, a review found that the flow which mattered didn't connect: venues lived only in the browser that drew them, avatars in local storage, and a visitor opening an event URL got a placeholder. Feature work stopped. That one path — drawn, saved, shared, then walked by a stranger — was made the skeleton, and everything since hangs off it.

Decisions we would make again

Zexpo keeps a numbered decision log. Every non-obvious choice gets an ID, a date, what was chosen, what was rejected, and why — so a decision can be argued with a year later instead of quietly re-litigated. There are 178 of them.

Its own repo, its own database. Zexpo reuses proven patterns from our earlier platform work but takes no live dependency on it. Different domain, different release cadence, clean independence.
Full navigable 3D in v1, with a 2D fallback. The spatial layer is the product, not a phase-two upgrade — but no visitor is ever locked out by a machine without WebGL.
Buy the real-time audio-video, don't build it. Self-hosted WebRTC is a company, not a feature. A managed SDK carries the calls; our engineering goes into the venue.
Event is a first-class entity. Not a tag on a marketplace — the container everything else is scoped by, enforced at the row level.
Bot-or-human is a schema constraint. The sender of a message is derived from who the caller provably is, never from what the client claims. Disclosure that can't be switched off.

How it was built

Zexpo went from empty repository to a working platform in four weeks, with several engineering lanes running in parallel. That only holds together under one discipline: code records what, only documentation records why — and undocumented work is lost work.

So the rules are unusual and non-negotiable. Touching a feature means updating that feature's document and its line on the build index in the same change; nothing is marked shipped without one. Status is written honestly, because a document that overstates progress is worse than no document. When the interface shows something wrong, the database is queried before a single line of frontend code is read. And nothing reaches production without being run locally first and signed off.

The result is 51 subject documents and a build index that answers "is this built, or only designed?" at a glance — for any engineer, on any day, without asking anyone.

By the numbers

Measured on 19 August 2026, four weeks after the first commit.

101,000 lines of application code and SQL
189 commits
64 database migrations
121 interface views and components
54 3D venue modules
107 authored 3D assets
178 logged decisions
51 knowledge documents
4 roles, one codebase

Stack: Vue 3, Vite, Tailwind, Three.js, glTF with Draco and KTX2 compression, Supabase, PostgreSQL 17 with row-level security, Realtime, Edge Functions, Vercel, and a Blender authoring pipeline.

Where it stands

Zexpo is deployed on production infrastructure and open to founding organizers, who can walk the venues and prebook stands at founding rates.

Running today: the venue builder, plan editor and plan-to-3D generator; the walkable venue with first-person navigation, stand kit, lighting and atmospheres; accounts, organizations, roles and event-scoped permissions; the organizer, exhibitor, visitor and admin surfaces; and stand chat with AI first response and human escalation.

In build: the avatar studio and photo-to-head pipeline, and multi-visitor presence in a shared venue.

Next: live voice and video meetings with scheduling and calendar invites, then paid subscriptions, stand checkout and analytics export.

Launch targets are set against the standard a physical show is held to: a venue on screen in under three seconds, chat under half a second, thousands of concurrent visitors per event, GDPR and UAE PDPL compliance, and WCAG 2.1 AA — because a virtual venue that can't be navigated by keyboard has rebuilt the stairs it was supposed to remove.

Ask AURA anything.

Ask AURA anything.