driftworld
A browser game on real Earth: fly a craft across ESRI/Impact Observatory Sentinel-2 10m land cover and 30m DEM. Water is navigable because the satellite says it is.
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GITHUB · launched Sep 11, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 88%) · 1 view
Niche: browser-based video games · 380 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▼ -28% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 380 launches in browser-based video games →
Could you build this?
Partial A basic browser flight game using WebGL and public geospatial APIs can be built quickly, but streaming, caching, and running smooth collision physics over multi-gigabyte global Sentinel-2 and 30m DEM elevation datasets requires non-trivial GIS streaming architecture.
What it would actually take: The stack would involve WebGL/Three.js or Cesium/deck.gl on the client, fetching Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) or pre-rendered quantized mesh terrain tiles from S3/Cloudflare. The hard part is managing dynamic tile loading, LOD (level of detail) transitions, and real-time terrain collision detection without stuttering at flight speeds in the browser. It requires specialized knowledge in 3D GIS rendering pipelines, spatial indexing (quadtrees/H3), and shader programming.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 266 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #242 of 267 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 303 days after the earliest competitor.
- Floating in Space Watching the earth · ph · 2026-11-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Every satellite that passed over any place this week, and its photos · hn · 2026-11-09 · 488 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Drift — explore stars · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- A browser game where you navigate home to Earth using pulsars · hn · 2026-11-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Glass Earth · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- AxionOrbital Space : SOTA Foundation Models for 24/7 Earth Observation · yc · 2026-01-06 · 230 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- EarthCraft · github · 2026-10-12 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Discover how small we are · ph · 2026-11-12 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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