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Show HN: Flight-Viz – 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM

58 pointsby coolwulfyesterday at 5:34 PM33 commentsview on HN

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.


Comments

whywhywhywhyyesterday at 11:20 PM

Zooming on a mouse wheel on windows is nearly unusable, it goes from whole of europe to town level in one mouse wheel notch.

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concensuretoday at 12:58 AM

Did you pay for flight api? Getting comprehensive real time flight data is quite a monetary challenge

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ge96yesterday at 8:53 PM

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.

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aduffyyesterday at 9:46 PM

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!

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coolwulfyesterday at 11:41 PM

For people having problems navigating, you can search flifht number on the left search bar. When click on the flight number, the view will jump over.

christophilusyesterday at 11:15 PM

Makes the divide between the developed and developing world very clear.

Edit: can’t be right. I think this is a dataset problem. China and Brazil should have more dots.

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maxwgyesterday at 9:04 PM

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

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ddoolinyesterday at 9:01 PM

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.

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paulnsorensenyesterday at 9:22 PM

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.

Levitatingyesterday at 11:00 PM

The wasm file (flight_viz_bg.wasm) was 10.94 MB as reported by firefox.

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Glubkeryesterday at 10:31 PM

Really cool! Curious to know how you made it render everything so fast with barely any loading.

Good work.

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lwansbroughyesterday at 9:05 PM

Could probably extrapolate positions based on heading and speed, to do some fake "real time" positions.

pstomiyesterday at 7:09 PM

It render extremely fast on my side (firefox, macOS). Which UI stack are you using? Is it egui?

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ameliusyesterday at 8:51 PM

Can you add pinch zoom?

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coolwulfyesterday at 5:35 PM

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