farseer.space
fly anywhere in the universe in your browser
Details
- External ID
- 49717936
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- farseer.space
- Website domain
- farseer.space
- Launched
- Sept. 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6220095693779905
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 19, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 19, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Description
I've been hacking on a universe simulator, modeled on the path that the amazing SpaceEngine worked out over a decade ago, but without its Windows platform restriction. It takes real scientific data where we have it and augments it with procedural generation. So you can fly to e.g. the Whirlpool Galaxy, see a real image of it, but then fly into a 3d model that's created based on the image characteristics and visit individual stars etc within it. Same with nebula and other celestial objects.I used to work at a small planetarium during undergrad, and we didn't have the funds to buy the fancy planetarium software. I dreamed of using something like this during shows to share the scale of the cosmos with visitors. I've added a dome projection mode, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to test it out in a real planetarium yet. If anyone has access, let me know if it works!There's also a sorta hidden presentation share mode where you can share a link and others can follow along with your journey. I added this cause screen sharing so often compresses scenes like this to death! It worked ok for a quick share with some coworkers, but I'm sure there are some issues.Mobile controls are rough but maybe passable. Really hoping for feedback on how hard this thing is to use and where to improve! If you know of datasets I should be including or ways to improve rendering let me know!Anyway, happy flying! There is an incomprehensible amount of stuff happening out there!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- browser-based universe flight simulator
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No A 3D browser-based universe simulator like SpaceEngine requires advanced 3D graphics programming, custom astronomical procedural generation, and logarithmic depth buffering.
What it would actually take: Built with WebGL/WebGPU and custom GLSL/WGSL shaders, managing floating-point precision issues across galactic scales using camera-relative rendering or double-precision emulation. Procedural terrain and planetary generation requires quadtree level-of-detail (LOD) sphere tiling, GPU noise functions, and parsing massive astrophysical star catalogs (Gaia/Hipparcos) with specialized spatial indexing like Octrees or HEALPix.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 223 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #107 of 224 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 319 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer · hn · 2026-08-24 · 137 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Blender Copilot · hn · 2026-09-26 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built a space travel calculator using Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-01-24 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.