2026Live
Orbital
Real-time visualisation of activity across Earth and near-Earth space.
A dark interactive globe sits at the centre, surrounded by sparse HUD telemetry built from live public data: aircraft positions, the ISS, earthquakes, storms, wildfires, volcanoes, space weather, and the satellite catalogue.
Four modes. Overview composes everything at once; Aviation, Space and Earth each narrow the field to one domain.
Engineering
- One instanced draw call per category, rather than a mesh per object.
- Screen-space decluttering, so dense aircraft fields stay readable.
- SGP4 satellite propagation from CelesTrak TLEs, run locally on a throttled frame budget.
- Natural Earth geometry loaded only near regional zoom, with a distance-based crossfade between detail levels.
- Provider responses isolated behind adapters, so components only ever see normalised domain models.
- Live status derived from real fetch timestamps, so a partly degraded feed never discards last-good data.
React, TypeScript, Vite, Three.js, React Three Fiber, Zustand, TanStack Query, Vitest