Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets
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The concept for metiq.space came after playing Global Magnates with friends and realizing how fragmented live global data is. ships, aircraft, satellites, ports, weather, hazards, infrastructure, cyber, and public datasets all exist, but they usually live in separate tools and maps.The goal was to build one interactive 3D globe where live public data could be visualized by latitude, longitude, and altitude. Surface data stays on the globe, while aircraft, satellites, and other above surface things can be represented in actual 3D space instead of being flattened onto a map.The outcome is an interactive globe that showcases Earth, air, sea, space, cyber, defense, infrastructure, politics, and the list is continuously growing.Majority of development right now is going into data filtering and deduping.
HN · launched Jun 16, 2026 · 148 upvotes (top 6%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive mapping platforms · 191 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Analytics & BI
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 191 launches in interactive mapping platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial Building a Three.js or Cesium 3D globe visualization in the browser is achievable with AI assistance, but aggregating, cleaning, harmonizing, and streaming 100 disparate live global feeds (AIS, ADS-B, satellites, weather) requires extensive data engineering.
What it would actually take: The platform requires a distributed ingest pipeline (Kafka, Redis, WebSockets) continually scraping or subscribing to 100+ public and private APIs/feeds (ADS-B for flights, AIS for ships, satellite TLEs, NOAA weather grids), coupled with a geospatial tile/stream server and a CesiumJS/Deck.gl frontend. The bottleneck is maintaining 100+ unstable scrapers/streams, normalizing disparate formats into standardized spatial-temporal points/polygons, and client-side rendering performance with 100k+ dynamic entities. It requires dedicated data engineering and WebGL/GIS expertise.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Windy.com (wind visualization), Earth globe visualization tools
Concerns raised: Geopolitical data accuracy (Crimea border representation), Performance sluggish with large datasets and zoom operations, Missing many TVA generating facilities in data, Poor tablet/mobile UX - requires landscape orientation, unresizable panels, Zoom behavior inconsistent between in and out on scrollwheel
Feature requests: Smooth continuous mouse wheel zoom instead of discrete levels, Crosshairs/targeting sprite should not scale with zoom, 5-year timelapse playback feature, Inside-the-globe topological view option, Support for larger viewport displays (1920x1080p and beyond)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 203 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #15 of 204 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 210 days after the earliest competitor.
- EARTH WAR · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Power 3D Globe · ph · 2026-10-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Météohélie · ph · 2026-11-10 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- liveworldtrends.com · ph · 2026-10-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Live Atlas · ph · 2026-10-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- hermes-osint-map · github · 2026-10-23 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- World Explorer · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- GlobeNow.tv · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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