World Explorer 3D is a browser-based geospatial exploration game built around real-world map context. Pick a preset city, use the interactive globe, or enter coordinates, then explore by walking, driving, flying, boating, or changing worlds entirely.
A current in-game capture of the expanded New York fixed world. Every image below was captured directly from the browser runtime, not rendered as concept art.
Version 4.3.0 turns the existing fixed world into a more coherent Explorer experience. It adds contextual Discovery, wildlife and geology, field tools, progression, companions and capability-aware AR while integrating those systems with the existing Journal, account, admin, tutorial, multiplayer and world lifecycles. It also strengthens visible bridge/tunnel continuity and expands the performance-bounded living population without creating another world loader.
Highlights:
- Map-informed Earth scenes with roads, buildings, terrain, land use, vegetation, water, bridges, tunnels, and selected landmarks.
- Preset cities, geolocation, coordinate entry, and an interactive globe for choosing locations worldwide.
- Live Earth views for observed satellites, earthquakes, aircraft, current weather, community street imagery, modeled marine conditions, and NOAA water-level/tide coverage.
- Walk, drive, drone, plane, boat, underwater, rover, astronaut, and rocket traversal.
- Selected-location Earth sessions with atomic loading and explicit cancellation.
- Structure-aware bridges, elevated roads, ramps, underpasses, and tunnels.
- Material-aware building facades and improved rooftop geometry with restrained fallbacks when mapped detail is unavailable.
- Terrain, actor, vehicle, and camera interpolation designed to prevent clipping and visible pose drift.
- In-session Earth, Moon, Mars, ocean, and space transitions without a page reload.
- A navigable solar system with planets, moons, asteroid and Kuiper belts, spacecraft, and inner/full system maps.
- Deep-space destinations including catalog-backed star systems, nebulae, galaxies, and black-hole encounters.
- Enterable buildings using mapped indoor geometry where available and footprint-aware generated interiors elsewhere.
- Multiplayer rooms, social/account features, world and game editors, a 200-piece block builder, fishing, and leaderboards.
- DeFlock Hunt, a virtual single-player and cooperative mode built from publicly mapped OpenStreetMap surveillance nodes.
- Live GPS Explore, an optional foreground-only mode that follows a player's physical location inside one bounded, fixed world without continuous-world streaming.
- Contextual AR for owned companions, recorded specimens, and habitat-aware virtual wildlife photo surveys, with WebXR, camera-overlay, and interactive-3D capability levels.
- Responsive touch controls for current iPhone and Android layouts.
- Provider health, freshness, cache, quality, datum, and fallback labels that distinguish observations, models, predictions, and reference-only data.
World Explorer 3D is designed to make the scale and structure of a place visible from the street, the water, and the air. These captures show the same runtime players launch from the live application.
| Baltimore waterfront | Monaco coast |
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| Mapped harbor, roads, and regional city context | Dense terrain-aware development along the Mediterranean |
| San Francisco Bay | Tokyo |
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| City scale shaped by land and water | Detailed local buildings inside a much larger urban region |
Bridges, elevated roads, ramps, tunnels, streets, and terrain are playable surfaces rather than background scenery. Players can move through the same location by car, on foot, by drone, by plane, or by boat where the environment supports it.
| Find a virtual camera | Disable it in the game |
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DeFlock Hunt is a fictional gameplay mode that places virtual representations of publicly mapped OpenStreetMap surveillance nodes in the loaded world. Disabling one affects only the game: no physical equipment is accessed, controlled, damaged, or otherwise affected.
Multiplayer uses bounded shared rooms rather than one continuous MMO server. A room keeps one fixed world/location, live player presence, chat, shared blocks, artifacts, and room activities together. Private rooms are unlisted and joined with a six-character invite code; public rooms are discovered by city; featured rooms are curated by administrators. Rooms support 2–32 players, with 8–14 recommended for the current browser renderer and Firestore presence model.
Run the real two-browser contract with npm run test:multiplayer-integration.
It uses local Auth and Firestore emulators and verifies private-code joining,
presence/movement, chat, and shared half-grid shape stacks without production
data.
Earth scenes use OpenStreetMap-derived geometry and other attributed public datasets. Source coverage, freshness, height data, and provider availability vary by location. The runtime uses bounded fallbacks when data is missing, but it does not claim survey-grade accuracy and is not a replacement for navigation or GIS software.
Required attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors
Requirements: Node.js 22+, Java 21, and a browser with WebGL support.
git clone https://github.com/RRG314/WorldExplorer3D.git
cd WorldExplorer3D
npm install
npm run build:hosting -- --firebase-env staging
python3 -m http.server --directory dist 4173Open http://127.0.0.1:4173/app/.
Core exploration can run locally without production credentials. Account, multiplayer, moderation, and other backend-dependent features require an authorized environment and are not configured by public repository secrets.
npm run build:hosting -- --firebase-env staging
npm run verify:hosting
npm run audit:reachability
npm run runtime:verify
npm run release:verifyruntime:verify is the fast pull-request gate. The full release gate additionally covers Firestore rules, mobile controls, editor and multiplayer surfaces, planetary round trips, provider fallbacks, ocean and biome behavior, and a representative global location matrix.
app/- canonical browser runtimedist/- ignored, generated hosting artifactfunctions/- authorized backend functionsscripts/- verification and release toolingtests/- security and runtime test fixturesassets/- landing and documentation mediagithub-pages/- static project explainer for GitHub Pages
Edit canonical source only. npm run build:hosting creates a fresh, content-hashed hosting artifact; generated dist/ files are never edited or committed.
npm run audit:reachability rejects hosted JavaScript or CSS that is no longer reachable from a declared page/runtime entrypoint.
- Complete system inventory and reconstruction guide — canonical whole-product inventory
- Architecture map — runtime, environments, world load, coordinates, surfaces, movement, maps, and lifecycle
- Data and provenance inventory — providers, truth classes, generated content, caches, assets, and attribution
- Persistence and trust inventory — browser storage, Firestore, rules, Functions, privacy, and deletion
- Product capability and maturity map — user-facing systems, subsystems, limitations, and status
- Test and release map — verification ownership, current blockers, candidate and promotion flow
- Explorer platform implementation report — focused recent-build evidence
- World Discovery and Interaction architecture/R&D
- World Discovery playable-build handoff
- Augmented Reality platform architecture/R&D
- Augmented Reality implementation handoff
- Changelog
- Roadmap
- Controls
- DeFlock Hunt
- Data sources and attribution
- Contributing
- Security policy
This repository is source-available under the custom terms in LICENSE. It is not licensed as OSI open-source software. Third-party data and assets remain subject to their respective licenses.