Radio Garden – Listen to world radio by navigating an interactive globe

Worth mentioning, a somewhat similar project with more entropy: http://radioiss.com.

I love it in the background when working, for the dose of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect.

I love this thing you've made. I've been exploring the world with radio since long before the WWW was invented. I used to carry a shortwave radio with me wherever I traveled back in the 1970s and 80s. I would lie there in the dark in Japan listening to the broadcasts out of North Korean screeching about the "Great Leader" (Kim Il-sung) or in Thailand listening to the Khmer Rouge (whom I couldn't understand, but I knew who controlled Cambodian broadcasts) or in the UK listening to Africans (not putting on a show for Americans but putting on a show for their own people) or on the East Coast of the US listening to callers to talk shows in the UK arguing about local issues. What do people there talk about amongst themselves? What do they like to listen to? What does such-and-such language sound like? I loved exploring the world this way.

My kids don't understand how magical the world is today--how they can do what cost me so much money and time and effort by doing nothing more than poking a few icons on their phones. These things don't mean much to them; they were born into a world where magic was just daily life.

But, things like this are still magical to me, even though I've been a developer for decades. Somehow, even knowing how the "tricks" are done, I still think it's magic. Just tonight, I fed YouTube into my HD TV and watched as someone walked around my old neighborhood in Tokyo with a 4K camera. Then again where I used to live in Seoul. And a couple of days ago, I found something for my father out in the desert a thousand miles from here by using Google Street View to "drive" down a remote highway, looking around until I found it. And now I can just spin the globe and point at a dot to hear a broadcast coming from that location. I've been listening to online broadcasts for 20 years using lists of online radio stations, but this is so much nicer.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who sees all of this as real-world magic.

One suggestion: maybe change the background to something black. Then it will feel more like the Earth is a part of cosmos - a context will be shown and will create a nicer feeling.

Seconding leaving the boundaries out. What would be awesome though is day/night simulation!