Sauron

Sauron is an intelligence dashboard built on a photorealistic 3D globe. The idea is simple and ambitious: a single vantage point on the world, where data that normally lives in dozens of separate tools overlays in real time.

On top of the globe — built with CesiumJS — light up air traffic, satellites, conflict zones, undersea cables, earthquakes and news. Every layer can be toggled on or off, and the system correlates signals: a ground event can pull up the news that tells its story.

The viewport is not a rectangle but a circular opening, an eye framing the planet, and the image can switch between seven visual styles — CRT, Night Vision, Thermal, Tactical, FLIR, EO — to radically change the reading of the same scene.

On the engineering side the challenge was scale: handling tens of thousands of entities and 25,000+ satellites with real-time ingestion via Supabase and WebSocket, on PostGIS, without losing smoothness. It is all in Next.js 16 and React 19, with custom GLSL shaders and PWA support.

Sauron is an exercise in information density: proving that complexity can be made readable without simplifying it, turning a mass of data into a view you can explore with your eyes.