[FREE] The Milky Way as we know it - 3D view in browser.

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1

A few weeks ago I showed my niece the latest meteor shower. Since then she hasn’t stopped asking: How far away are the stars? What even is a star? Can we get to another star? :milky_way:

So together with my brother, we built her (and everyone) a website: Exo-View. A 3D atlas of the Milky Way, as we know it.

What’s inside:
• 32,639 real stars from the HYG catalogue, each where it was measured and in its own colour
• Flights to the nearest stars, with the real distance in light-years
• Nebulae and black holes at their real positions, with light bending computed in a shader (ray-marching)
• The solar system from orbital data for this very moment, and eclipses on their real dates
• Earth with World Bank data and an index builder

It all runs in the browser: three.js + WebGL, nothing to install, in English and Hebrew.
I’d love feedback, especially on performance across devices :folded_hands:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: https://exo-view.com

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The mix of real HYG catalogue positions with light bending in a shader is a great combination, and 32k stars at their measured positions is a lot to keep smooth. Since you asked about performance across devices: for my own ray-marched black hole, tiering helped more than optimising the loop. 190 steps by default, 340 only with a mouse, a wide screen, eight cores and 8 GB, and a flat fallback for software GPUs. On phones I let the resolution climb from 1 to 1.5 pixels per point only while the frame rate holds, and step back down if it stutters. Do you march the whole screen, or only a quad around each black hole?