Building a live 3D globe of real time web traffic with Th...

For the new Zenovay landing page I built a 3D globe that shows actual live visits from customer sites in close to real time. Dots glow and fade where visits happen.

This post is a complete walkthrough of how it's built, in case you want to do something similar.

What you see vs what it actually is

What the visitor sees: a smooth spinning Earth with bright dots appearing in different countries every few seconds.

What it actually is:

A THREE.SphereGeometry with an Earth texture
A THREE.Points instance updated in place as events arrive
A custom GLSL fragment shader for the glow effect
Server Sent Events streaming batched data from Cloudflare Workers
Lazy initialization to keep LCP fast

The data flow

Visitor on customer site
  -> Tracking script POSTs event to Cloudflare Worker (sub 100ms)
  -> Worker pushes to Queue
  -> Consumer aggregates per region every 2s
  -> SSE stream pushes to landing page
  -> Three.js animates new dot

The points system (the tricky part)

Points need to appear, glow, and fade. Re creating geometry every event is too expensive. Instead, allocate a fixed buffer and reuse slots.

buildPointsSystem() {
  this.maxPoints = 1000
  this.points = new Float32Array(this.maxPoints * 3)
  this.lifetimes = new Float32Array(this.maxPoints)
  this.cursor = 0

  this.pointsGeometry = new THREE.BufferGeometry()
  this.pointsGeometry.setAttribute('position', 
    new THREE.BufferAttribute(this.points, 3))
  this.pointsGeometry.setAttribute('lifetime', 
    new THREE.BufferAttribute(this.lifetimes, 1))
}

addPoint(lat, lng) {
  const [x, y, z] = latLngToVec3(lat, lng, 5.05)
  const i = this.cursor * 3
  this.points[i] = x
  this.points[i + 1] = y
  this.points[i + 2] = z
  this.lifetimes[this.cursor] = 1.0
  this.cursor = (this.cursor + 1) % this.maxPoints
  this.pointsGeometry.attributes.position.needsUpdate = true
}

The glow shader

// Vertex shader
attribute float lifetime;
varying float vLifetime;

void main() {
  vLifetime = lifetime;
  vec4 mvPosition = modelViewMatrix * vec4(position, 1.0);
  gl_PointSize = 8.0 * lifetime;
  gl_Position = projectionMatrix * mvPosition;
}

// Fragment shader
varying float vLifetime;

void main() {
  vec2 center = gl_PointCoord - vec2(0.5);
  float dist = length(center);
  if (dist > 0.5) discard;

  float intensity = 1.0 - smoothstep(0.0, 0.5, dist);
  vec3 color = mix(vec3(0.3, 1.0, 0.7), vec3(0.5, 1.0, 0.9), vLifetime);
  gl_FragColor = vec4(color, intensity * vLifetime);
}

Coordinates: lat/lng to 3D

function latLngToVec3(lat, lng, radius) {
  const phi = (90 - lat) * (Math.PI / 180)
  const theta = (lng + 180) * (Math.PI / 180)
  return [
    -radius * Math.sin(phi) * Math.cos(theta),
    radius * Math.cos(phi),
    radius * Math.sin(phi) * Math.sin(theta)
  ]
}

Performance notes

THREE.Points with BufferGeometry keeps GPU memory stable
Fixed size buffer avoids GC pressure
Pixel ratio capped at 2 (no point rendering 3x on retina)
Lazy initialization: globe loads after main content paint
60fps on iPhone 12, ~45fps on a 5 year old budget Android

See the final result on the landing page: zenovay.com

If you want the full source as a template, drop a comment and I'll open source it.

Valerio

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