How a dev team built a photorealistic browser globe in just 1.5 MB
A web development team at INTFRAME has built an interactive 3D Earth visualization that loads in approximately 1.5 MB despite its cinematic appearance. The globe uses NASA Blue Marble imagery and a night-lights dataset sampled into around 46,000 rendered points, while high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite patches zoom in on four specific cities the camera visits. A custom scroll-driven animation flies the camera along great-circle paths between locations, with stable camera math and smooth north-up arrivals eliminating common glitching issues. A built-in performance governor monitors frame times and reduces internal resolution dynamically to prevent slowdowns on weaker devices. The project's companion code has been published on GitHub under the repository intframe/scroll-rig.
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