Flight-Viz
10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM
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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.
HN · launched Apr 1, 2026 · 101 upvotes (top 11%) · 0 views
Niche: geospatial and transport tracking platforms · 50 launches, 7 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 50 launches in geospatial and transport tracking platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial While rendering basic 3D scenes is accessible, smoothly interpolating and instancing 10,000+ real-time aircraft positions at 60 FPS in Rust/WASM with custom WebGL shaders requires low-level graphics optimization.
What it would actually take: A real implementation uses Rust compiled to WebAssembly with WebGL2 instanced rendering for aircraft meshes, KD-trees or spatial hashing for coordinate queries, and binary WebSocket streaming of ADS-B flight feeds. The hard parts are writing GPU instancing shaders to handle 10k dynamic transforms without CPU-GPU bus bottlenecks and managing memory tightly within browser WASM heap constraints. Expertise in low-level graphics programming (WebGL/OpenGL) and Rust systems programming is necessary.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenSky
Concerns raised: Limited flight data coverage for China and South America, High cost of comprehensive real-time flight data APIs, Icon visibility issues when zoomed in with light-colored map tiles, Plane icons shift position when panning at high zoom levels, Zoom centers on browser window middle instead of cursor position
Feature requests: Satellite view option when zooming in, Improve icon contrast/visibility with dark color for flight numbers, Zoom to cursor position instead of window center
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 175 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #34 of 176 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 149 days after the earliest competitor.
- EarthCraft · github · 2026-10-12 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Overhead Flights · ph · 2026-11-11 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Planes.fyi · hn · 2025-12-17 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Live Flight Tracker Map · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- WAMR3D · ph · 2026-11-13 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Interactive 3D globe of EU shipping emissions · hn · 2026-03-06 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- My live 3D satellite tracker, now with asteroids and a UAP archive · hn · 2026-10-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Magula Flight Tracker · ph · 2026-10-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.