Flight-Viz
10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM
Details
- External ID
- 47603966
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Flight-Viz
- Website domain
- flight-viz.com
- Launched
- April 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 101
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8939588688946015
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- space and geospatial visualization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- 3d globe visualization for flight data
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 61 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #14 of 62 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 149 days after the earliest competitor.
- Planes.fyi · hn · 2025-12-17 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Live Flight Tracker Map · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Interactive 3D globe of EU shipping emissions · hn · 2026-03-06 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- 2.7KB Zig WASM · hn · 2026-03-29 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets · hn · 2026-06-16 · 148 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Immersive Globe · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- The Last Website · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- MapAnimate · ph · 2026-09-26 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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