Polaris is a public observatory and science foundation. Their virtual planetarium brings live telescope feeds and a navigable star atlas to schools worldwide.
The challenge
Render 110,000 stars on a 2015 school Chromebook — and keep the experience fully usable by keyboard and screen reader.
The approach
A tiered WebGL renderer that degrades from shader-instanced points to canvas sprites, with a parallel semantic layer narrating constellations as structured text.
410k
Students reached in year one
60fps
On 8-year-old hardware
WCAG AA
Fully conformant