Demo 02 · For global brands, NGOs, and oceanographic platforms

Planetary currents, in motion.

A real-time ocean-current field rendered on a 3D earth. Twelve thousand fluid particles, each advected by a sum of major gyre rotations and the Antarctic Circumpolar zonal band. Drag to rotate. Scroll to zoom. The full simulation runs in your browser at sixty frames per second; the dataset behind it could be your reanalysis, your salinity field, your shipping traffic.

Ocean current simulation

Flow rate 1.00 Particles 12000 Trail length 0.965

FPS—

Frame ms—

Avg speed—

Particles—

Slow → Fast

0cm/s · norm100+

drag · ctrl + scroll to zoom

Hold Ctrl (or ⌘) and scroll to zoom

If you publish

Climate research · oceanographic platforms · maritime shipping · global-mission NGOs

Your data lives in netCDF files and academic papers. The board, the press, the donor base, the public — they need to *feel* the planet you're describing. Static maps die in the seventh scroll of a quarterly report; a globe with the data flowing on it crosses the room.

The problem we solve

Planetary-scale data doesn't compress to a screenshot. An ocean current is a thousand trajectories. A wind field is a moving texture. A shipping route is a story over time. The right substrate is an interactive WebGL globe; the right execution is a particle simulation that runs client-side, instantly, on the visitor's phone.

What we'd build for you

Ingest your dataset: CMEMS ocean reanalysis, HYCOM, ECMWF wind, AIS vessel tracks, salinity, chlorophyll-a, sea-surface temperature, whatever you publish.
Project onto a Three.js earth tuned to your brand surface: texture, atmospheric tone, type.
Run the particle integration on the client, GPU-accelerated for large fields. We can also render in a worker thread so the rest of the page stays interactive.
Encode additional variables by color, particle size, or trail length. The model in this demo is analytical; yours would be data-driven.

Stakes

Without it: your data sits behind a download link. Most visitors never read the paper. The story stays in the abstract.

With it: the visitor moves the globe and feels what your science describes. The next click is usually a donation, a partnership inquiry, or a press request.

Discuss a planetary-data globe →

How it's built

Vector field: analytical model combining five major gyres (North/South Atlantic, North/South Pacific, Indian) modeled as 2D rotations falling off with distance from each center, plus the Antarctic Circumpolar Current as a strong eastward zonal band at 60° S, plus the equatorial counter-current at 5° N.
Particle integration: 12,000 particles each carrying (lat, lon, age). Every frame: sample the field, Euler-step on the sphere, increment age, respawn when age expires or speed stalls. ~1.2 million field evaluations per second sustained.
Rendering: THREE.Points with vertex colors and additive blending. Speed is mapped through a deep-sea → hot-magenta gradient. Particle size attenuates with distance from camera.
Trail effect: the renderer's autoClearColor is disabled and a low-alpha quad is drawn each frame, so previous-frame pixels persist briefly. Adjustable via the Trail length slider.
Earth surface: Three.js SphereGeometry with NASA Blue Marble texture (equirectangular). Fresnel-style atmospheric halo via a back-side sphere shader.
Orbit: hand-rolled spherical orbit control (no OrbitControls dependency). Drag rotates azimuth/elevation, ctrl+wheel adjusts the camera radius.