Dev Builds WebGL Road of 10 Million Banknotes to Visualize a Billion Dollars

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A developer set out to create a single-page web experience answering how large one billion dollars would be in physical $100 bills, a total of 10 million notes weighing 10 tonnes and covering roughly 103,000 square metres. The project, initially expected to take a weekend, grew significantly in complexity once the goal shifted from displaying numbers to making the scale feel tangible. To avoid crashing the browser, the developer used WebGL via Three.js, rendering only a fixed stretch of a scrolling road textured to look like banknotes, with roadside objects recycled in a reusable pool rather than created fresh each frame. Users can drive vehicles ranging from a tractor to an F-35 jet along the money road using arrow keys, with each vehicle assigned a distinct speed to reinforce the sense of distance. A key technical lesson from the build was maintaining a single source of truth for core physical measurements, after a duplication bug caused two stack-height figures on the same page to disagree for nearly an hour.

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