Explore the Reddit r/place 2017 - 2022 canvas history in 3D.
An online version can be found here.
In order to implement this on a static website (GitHub Pages), some technical challenges need to be addressed:
- Store the entire history based on the publicly available data (990MB, 20GB) on GitHub.
- Starting from a more compact version (available here) the data was uploaded in chunks as zipped json files.
- Load the entire history into browser memory to allow rapid back and forth navigation.
- The zipped files are loaded in the background via Web Worker processes and passed to the UI thread.
- Render more than 4 million (2000 * 2000) voxels in real time.
- A fast rendering process via three.js requires the position/color of each voxel to be stored. This is very memory intense and causes browser crashes if the hardware in use is insufficient.
Once the rendering problem has been properly solved, the Z dimension would be a history representation visualized through stacked voxels.
