[HN Gopher] Show HN: Flight-Viz - 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3...
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Show HN: Flight-Viz - 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of
Rust+WASM
I built a real-time flight tracker that renders 10,000+ aircraft on
an interactive 3D globe, entirely in the browser using Rust
compiled to WebAssembly.
Author : coolwulf
Score : 40 points
Date : 2026-04-01 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flight-viz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flight-viz.com)
| pstomi wrote:
| It render extremely fast on my side (firefox, macOS). Which UI
| stack are you using? Is it egui?
| coolwulf wrote:
| It's mainly eGui + WebGPU
| amelius wrote:
| Can you add pinch zoom?
| coolwulf wrote:
| Currently I developed this for desktop browser, so it might not
| work well on mobile. But I will improve and update it.
| pohl wrote:
| You should be able to do pinch zoom support for laptops with
| a trackpad, too. I think it would be
|
| window.addEventListener('wheel', ... )
|
| Fantastic work!
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, I'm on desktop now. And I notice another "issue". When I
| use my mouse wheel to zoom, the point that my mouse cursor is
| on is not stationary. This makes it hard to zoom in on e.g. a
| specific aircraft or landmark.
| coolwulf wrote:
| I can take a look. The current zoom is zooming to screen
| center. Maybe I should change it to cursor location.
| ge96 wrote:
| Why is there almost no traffic in places like South America
| (other than Brazil) and Africa? Data set or reality? Not much in
| China/Russia either.
| coolwulf wrote:
| The current data is from OpenSky, mainly north america and EU.
| ddoolin wrote:
| When you zoom in to the street map level, the planes are
| practically invisible with their color and thin borders. Pretty
| neat though, that's a lot to load and keep smooth.
| coolwulf wrote:
| If you switch to satelite view, the planes will be very
| visible.
| maxwg wrote:
| Impressive. The planes should probably scale up a bit as you zoom
| though, they become impossible to spot.
|
| I'm surprised all the flights in the world can be represented in
| a <500KB api call
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Could probably extrapolate positions based on heading and speed,
| to do some fake "real time" positions.
| paulnsorensen wrote:
| Wow. I won't give you a feature request :) just appreciation.
|
| It really puts into perspective the magnitude of air traffic when
| you have this visualization.
| aduffy wrote:
| There's something a little off about the projection logic when
| you drop into the Leaflet view, you'll notice that when you pan
| around after zooming the planes shift their location.
|
| Very cool demo though!
| coolwulf wrote:
| Need to check my calculations. Thanks for noticing it.
| Glubker wrote:
| Really cool! Curious to know how you made it render everything so
| fast with barely any loading.
|
| Good work.
| coolwulf wrote:
| :P just optimize to the extreme
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