Frontend Engineering at Palantir: Polar Scaled Tiles in Zodiac

This post details the development of polar scaled tiles within Palantir's Zodiac 3D globe library to address performance issues at the poles. The system moves from a standard Web Mercator tiling approach, which causes excessive geometry generation near the poles, to a surface-area-aware tiling strategy. This involves calculating tile spans based on spherical surface area, dynamically adjusting child tile counts in the quadtree, and implementing client-side texture stitching and heightmap resampling. The system also addresses blending to fixed heights over a 5-degree transition zone at the actual poles.