Map Trip
PrototypeExperiments · 2026
A 30-second flight-route video, written as React code instead of edited on a timeline.
A glowing route is drawn across a dark world map from Los Angeles to New York to Paris, then the camera cuts to a 3D Eiffel Tower at night. Every frame is a React component, rendered to MP4 with Remotion.
Why it exists
Most video is edited by hand. Here the video is a program: change a city or a timing constant and re-render, with nothing to re-cut.
What it does
- No timeline: the map, route, city markers and moving plane are all pure functions of the current frame number.
- Routes follow great-circle paths on a Natural Earth projection of real country boundaries, so they curve like actual flight paths.
- The Eiffel Tower is procedural three.js geometry with no model file, standing over a field of 160 stars.
- Deterministic by design: the stars use a seeded pseudo-random function instead of Math.random, so every render produces identical frames.