Cool writeup! I agree with this sentiment 100%: "the web is poised to embrace 3D en masse". And with the heady webgl adoption that threejs brings, we see sites

Cool writeup! I agree with this sentiment 100%: "the web is poised to embrace 3D en masse". And with the heady webgl adoption that threejs brings, we see sites with decorative elements that hog resources, inhibit user interactions, and make finding the actual information you are looking for a nightmare. It's a power tool, use it judiciously ;) Post fails to mention how they are actually rendering the "dots". But I feel perhaps they are executing excessive draw calls. 100K is not egregious. ThreeJS docs include many instanced geometry samples. As well as library level particle systems and materials. All anim logic handled via shaders. Raw webgl points without textures are also very performant for things like starfields, etc. Wanted to link up the original "webgl-globe". Visualization originally used at Google to see where in the world search requests were arriving from: https://github.com/dataarts/webgl-globe https://github.com/dataarts/webgl-globe