Hello Hacker News. We built a game where you can upload memes on a ball. All open source : )
What you see is in fact a 2D game. We don't use three.js or any 3D at all! Its all math- an 2:1 equirectangular image is projected on a globe using orthographic projection using WebGL. That's the secret sauce to make the game super fast. All in 5 MB of ram.
We originally started off with globe-gl and three.js. It cost 60 MB ram and took 6-7 seconds to load! We did some insane optimizations and rewrote everything from scratch.
Source code- https://github.com/5land/5land-client
Technical blog bost on how we built the app- https://blog.5land.org//hello-5land/