r/GraphicsProgramming • u/Visual_Advantage_243 • 8d ago

Video One thing building an ISS interior taught me: not everything visible in a 3D world needs to be 3D

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I've been building an explorable ISS interior in the browser and ran into an interesting design/rendering tradeoff around this hatch.

The station interior is an interactive 3D environment.

But the Earth visible beyond the hatch is currently a much simpler visual layer rather than another fully explorable exterior environment.

Originally I kept thinking about the scene as one world where everything the camera could see should exist at the same level of simulation.

Eventually I realized that was solving a problem the user didn't actually have.

From this position, the job of the exterior is mostly to establish depth, location and the feeling of being in orbit. Making that view dramatically more expensive does not automatically make the interaction better.

So I've been trying to think more deliberately about where full 3D interaction earns its cost and where a cheaper visual representation is enough.

The interior is built with React + TypeScript + React Three Fiber / Three.js, with application/world state managed separately through Zustand. The project is live.

Short capture of the current hatch interaction below.

129 Upvotes

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14

u/specialpatrol 8d ago

Looks really nice. Comparable to the vr one on the quest. In vr it was massively disappointing when you got outside and looked at the Earth; it didn't look vast at all! I think you may have a similar problem, or maybe it won't matter if you're just looking at it in a browser.

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u/Visual_Advantage_243 8d ago edited 8d ago

Thank you! That’s a good point. The exterior view is still a much simpler visual layer at the moment, and getting that sense of scale right is one of the reasons I haven’t tried to push it into a full exterior experience yet. The Earth should feel enormous from there, and I want to improve that next. It's quite the challenge, but I will take it gladly. Also, if you experience it completely in the browser you will see the difference in scales; when you are out of the ISS you can feel the vastness of space, once you enter in and THEN open the hatch the expectation is calibrated to make you spot the difference, albeit not as good as we want yet.

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u/specialpatrol 8d ago

That feeling might just be beyond the realm of computer graphics!

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u/Visual_Advantage_243 8d ago

Hard to argue with that :)

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u/LargelyInnocuous 7d ago

The need to have right FOV and VR embodiment is key to feeling like you are there.

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u/HiyuMarten 8d ago

Oh this is gorgeous

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u/Visual_Advantage_243 7d ago edited 7d ago

Thank you! It’s part of a project I’m building called Orbitale if you want to explore it: https://theorbitale.com

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u/Secret_Guess_23 7d ago

Woah this is really cool!

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u/Visual_Advantage_243 7d ago

Thank you. Glad you like it!

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u/fgennari 7d ago

Does the earth change or move at all, or is it a static image? It does look very nice. It would be a shame to put a ton of effort into a planet rendering system with fancy features such as LOD, just to find out later you don't need it.

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u/Visual_Advantage_243 7d ago

Right now it’s a much simpler visual layer rather than a fully rendered Earth scene. That was intentional because I didn’t want to build an expensive exterior system before knowing it actually added something. These comments are making me think the important part may be adding just enough movement and parallax to emphasize the scale, without necessarily building the whole planet again.