How the WCA Globe works
/wca/globe is an interactive 3D globe of WCA competitions, built on MapLibre GL JS with vector tiles. Modes include upcoming-comp clusters, animated cuber career trajectories, and historical event density.
Three modes
The mode selector at the top switches between:
- Upcoming — shows clustered upcoming WCA competitions worldwide. Zoom in to expand clusters to individual comps; click to see date / location / events.
- Cuber — type any WCA-ID to animate that person's career competition locations as a time-ordered arc sequence. Play / pause / scrub the timeline.
- Density — shows historical WCA competition density across the globe in three styles: log-scale, heatmap, or country choropleth. Drag the year slider to inspect a specific time window.
Controls
1
Basic navigation
Left-drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan. Touch devices support single-finger rotate and pinch-to-zoom.
2
Map styles
The layers button in the top right switches between vector map, satellite imagery, and dark-mode map. Dark mode follows the site theme automatically.
3
Drawing tools
The toolbar at the bottom offers measure / path / polygon drawing modes. Use them to measure great-circle distances between comps or to mark regions of interest.
4
Cuber mode playback
After entering a WCA-ID, click Play to start the animation — arcs draw chronologically. The timeline is scrub-able; playback speed is 0.5× / 1× / 2×.
Data and technology
The globe uses MapLibre GL JS (open-source WebGL), with tiles from the site or MapTiler. WCA competition coordinates come from the weekly dump. Density calculations run in the client in real-time (Canvas + vt-pbf vector tile encoding). Satellite mode requires network; vector tiles render entirely in the browser and work offline.
See also
- Competition Calendar — the same competition data in a calendar layout.
- Competition Results — round-by-round results viewer.
- MapLibre GL JS — the WebGL rendering engine, Apache 2.0 open source.