Low Poly Earth
The whole planet in 3D, built from OpenStreetMap data
Details
- External ID
- 49880443
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Low Poly Earth
- Website domain
- pages.dev
- Launched
- Sept. 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.32854864433811803
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Oct. 1, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
- Updated at
- Oct. 1, 2026, 1:01 a.m.
Description
After seeing demos of Claude and GPT construct Manhattan and other city neighborhoods in 3D I was inspired to make something similar but for the entire Earth.It's a low poly version of Google Earth built using open street and elevation data as a native Apple silicon Mac app. It was built entirely using Codex and Claude Code and took about 80 days.
Enrichment
- Theme
- specialized calculators and estimation tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Data infrastructure
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 3d low poly planet visualization based on openstreetmap data
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While procedural low-poly graphics and map viewer wrappers exist, building a smooth native 3D engine handling whole-planet OSM and elevation tile streaming requires custom spatial indexing and graphics shaders.
What it would actually take: Requires native Apple Metal or a modern C++/Rust/Swift game engine to implement a 3D terrain quadtree (clipmaps/LOD) dynamically streaming global elevation GeoTIFFs and OpenStreetMap vector data. The developer must write custom geometry processing pipelines to tessellate building polygons and manage level-of-detail transitions in real time.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Feature requests: Run in the browser
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 52 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #28 of 53 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 264 days after the earliest competitor.
- Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets · hn · 2026-06-16 · 148 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- TerraShift: What does +2°C (or -20°C) look like on Earth? · hn · 2026-03-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Paint the Earth on a live, interactive globe (collaborative art.) · hn · 2026-07-06 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Blue Marble · ph · 2026-09-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Extinct Atlas: Deep-Time Walkway · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- World Explorer · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- EL EARTH · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future · hn · 2026-08-09 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.