Great visualization and approach with compressing the tile data. Do you have a comparison of how much smaller the payload ends up being compared to simply sending PNG files?
I use PNGs to encode elevation data in my 3D mapping library (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/) and this does a pretty good job of compressing the data, for example in the ocean the PNG files are also very small as the image is mostly black. Different use case I now as your data is much more sparse, but I wonder how close the PNG compression would be compared to your approach.
I use PNGs to encode elevation data in my 3D mapping library (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js/) and this does a pretty good job of compressing the data, for example in the ocean the PNG files are also very small as the image is mostly black. Different use case I now as your data is much more sparse, but I wonder how close the PNG compression would be compared to your approach.