Roadmap

Last reviewed: 26 August 2026.

This page is the canonical public roadmap for Universe Map. It describes outcomes and evidence gates rather than promising release dates. Scientific accuracy, readable navigation, stable frame time, and a fully static browser architecture remain constraints for every item.

How to read the roadmap

Status	Meaning
Delivered	Available in the current application and covered by automated tests
Current	The next improvements to the existing experience
Next	Work that first needs a scientific contract or physical measurements
Deferred	Useful only when new evidence, source data, or a denser catalogue exists

Delivered

• The Earth-observer planetarium provides a freely pannable 10,000-star HYG sky, modern constellations, altitude and azimuth, a 102°–2° pointer-anchored field of view, 461 URL-restorable observing places, and sourced-but-illustrative local horizons.
• The Moon and seven visible planets reuse their existing Three.js objects, materials, lighting, and deferred textures in the observer view. Their topocentric directions and angular diameters are calculated; a bounded readability floor remains explicitly illustrative.
• Stellar points and the Milky Way now gain useful detail continuously under zoom instead of relying on a fixed pixel footprint. Navigation also clears stale targets and selections when their visual context disappears.
• HYG J2000 Cartesian velocities now propagate the shared star catalogue, observer sky, and constellation figures through time with explicit extrapolated confidence and a ±10,000-Julian-year validity clamp.
• Published walls, probabilistic basins, attractors, and repellers retain separate provenance and visual semantics rather than being merged into the Tempel filament network.
• Cold startup, Tempel transition, resource stability, and frame stability have repeatable browser benchmarks.

Current priorities

• Accept measured terrain-obstruction inputs where authoritative coverage exists while keeping the current skyline, city lights, and generic terrain clearly marked as illustrative.

The observer planetarium is a topocentric view of the selected instant. It must remain distinct from the temporal Observable map mode, whose goal is to represent received light across distance.

Next measured investments

• Define and implement a physically delayed temporal Observable mode with light-travel time, deterministic transitions, and visible confidence labels. The present preview still uses simultaneous-state positions for parts of the map.
• Run the Tempel cold-transition and startup, memory, and frame-rate benchmarks on representative physical low-, medium-, and high-end devices. Shader precompilation or heavier fallbacks will only be added when those measurements justify their cost.

Deliberately deferred

• The prepared stellar aggregate hierarchy stays dormant until a denser source catalogue needs a visible cross-scale representation. Any activation must move preparation to a Web Worker and avoid invisible network or GPU work.
• Additional irregular-body silhouettes or polygonal models will only ship when an authoritative shape product justifies the download, decoding, attribution, and rendering cost.

Product boundary

This roadmap does not promise an exhaustive Universe, live weather, ground exploration, full gravitational simulation, or relativistic ray tracing. See Scientific confidence and Performance and limits for the current contract.

Continue with About the project.