So basically, I am tasked with "recreating" a 3D Earth, comprised of (very small) tiles made of NASA Landsat 8 images (png). Each point on Earth is imaged once every 16 days or so, and the API I'm using serves the latest images (ie they can't be compiled offline and used statically) .
These tiles are ~150kb each, and have a width and height of 0.025 lat/long. This means that I'll probably have to use a static mesh for low zoom levels, and as a user zooms in, Landsat tiles will be dynamically generated based on their viewport.
Have any of you built a 3D Earth with custom tiling before? I was looking at the WebGL Earth API, but it's very limited. I've also taken a look at Cesium, but I'm not sure if it's capable of what I want to do.
Basically, I'm looking for a 3D model of Earth (or even just a sphere) that will allow me to "stick" images to specific lat/lon points. Otherwise, I suppose I'll just have to make a sphere in ThreeJs and do the calculations myself, but I'm afraid that without using a pre-existing map system (like Leaflet), the whole thing will come out totally inaccurate.
Cesium can already do exactly what you want quite easily. Depending on the API you are using, there's a good chance we already have an Imagery Provider that can ingest it, most imagery like you describe is usually using one of the major standards. If not, implementing a custom provider is only a couple dozen lines of code.
I would recommend you check out the Imagery Layers tutorial to get started and don't hesitate to ask questions on our forum.
If you can provide more details, I can give you more specific advice.