Frontend Engineering at Palantir: Polar Scaled Tiles in Zodiac

This post details the implementation of polar scaled tiles in Zodiac to improve 3D globe rendering performance at the poles. It introduces a surface-area-aware tiling strategy that deviates from standard Web Mercator, dynamically calculates tile spans based on spherical surface area, and adjusts child tile counts in the quadtree. The post also covers client-side texture stitching for standard geodetic/Mercator tiles and heightmap resampling with bilinear interpolation, including blending to fixed heights at the poles.