The straightest line is a curve.
On a flat map, the fastest route between two cities looks like a diagonal. On the real Earth it bends — arcing toward the poles, hugging the planet's curvature. This is the great circle: the shortest path between any two points on a sphere, and the line every signal wants to follow.
MERIDIAN draws them as they are — luminous meridional threads that lift off the surface, carry a travelling pulse of light, and settle again at a distant exchange. What you see spinning above is not decoration. It is geometry made visible.
Ninety-nine percent of everything travels under the sea.
The cloud is a coastline. Beneath it runs a lattice of submarine cables — glass filaments no thicker than a garden hose, laid across ocean trenches and continental shelves, carrying nearly all intercontinental data between the world's landing stations.
A single fibre pair can move terabits per second. A cut off the coast of Alexandria can slow half a continent. MERIDIAN models this as a network of exchange nodes and weighted routes — priority backbones in amber, standard capacity in cyan — pulsing in real time as packets find the horizon.
the seafloor
systems worldwide
target, five nines
fraction of light
A mission-control view of a living network.
MERIDIAN is a monitor, not a map. Nodes report their degree and latency; the route engine fires new links on the fly; a day-night terminator sweeps the globe as it turns. Everything above is computed — the arcs are true great circles, the pulses are timed to their length, the land is a point-cloud masked to real coastlines.
Grab the globe to spin it. Let go and it drifts. Hover a node and its connections rise out of the field while the rest dim to context. This is what the internet would look like if you could stand back far enough to see all of it at once.
Interaction — drag to rotate with momentum, scroll to zoom, hover any exchange node for a live readout. Toggle arcs, labels, and the auto-route engine from the status panel.
Built on Three.js WebGL — a stylized dot-matrix Earth, additive great-circle tubes, fresnel atmosphere, and a fixed sun. No photographic textures. Everything is drawn from coordinates.