Diavik Diamond Mine Tour — Field Companion PWA
An offline-first progressive web app built for Rio Tinto's Diavik Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories. The app needed to store and serve ~1GB of video, audio, and text content on an iPad in a remote Arctic environment with no reliable connectivity. Content updates were performed whenever WiFi was available.
Drupal served as a headless CMS and REST API for content management, consumed by a fully custom Node.js/Webpack frontend. Media files were chunked, stored as ArrayBuffers in IndexedDB, and reassembled client-side. A Service Worker handled caching and offline availability across the entire app.
Highlights
- Fully offline-capable on iOS iPad with ~1GB of cached media
- Media chunked and stored as ArrayBuffers in IndexedDB, reassembled client-side
- Drupal used exclusively as a headless REST API
- Sync on WiFi, fully functional without connectivity