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To design and develop an interactive globe

stripe.com

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Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#41

Post by billfruit »

growlist wrote: post #40
billfruit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't exactly get this argument. It is not only about what you see on screen, I was talking about geographic operations like spatial queries being executed on the globe rather than on a projected 2d surface.

> spatial queries being executed on the globe But it's perfectly possible to create geodesically-correct buffers, for example - such as you might see when calculating ballistic missile range over thousands of kilometres - in a 2D projection, and indeed this has been available for decades. And we have plenty of global models, such as WGS 84: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System So what exactly are you t…

So do you think there is no benefit if we can avoid projections entirely? Also won't using 3d make working with great-circle paths easier?

Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#42

Post by Const-me »

blauditore wrote: post #27

The dots in 3d are certainly the best-looking solution of the ones they mention, but most likely also significantly slower than a texture-based approach. It makes their website extremely janky for me when scrolling, on an upper-midrange laptop.

> slower than a texture-based approach

Try to rotate the globe with a mouse, and you'll see an effect very hard to achieve with a texture.

> makes their website extremely janky for me when scrolling, on an upper-midrange laptop.

Probably a software issue with your laptop, not with the web site. Works fine on my low-range laptop (i3-6157u, 16GB RAM, Windows 10, MS Edge).

Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#45

Post by akhilcacharya »

tenbino wrote: post #8

These giant companies employ/stockpile vast numbers of elite programmers who they don’t really need. So they build other things. Nice work if you can get it.

Stripe isn't "giant" but it does seem to do a lot of this. They have job postings for their Ruby type checker...

Meanwhile my company is giant by any stretch of the imagination but I've never seen projects like this. It's a cultural thing borne out of the elite circles Stripe folks come from.

Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#46

Post by robenkleene »

It's fascinating to me that so much 3D web design work is still done by hand in code, rather than using a visual 3D tool.

3D in web design essentially means simple rotating shapes, e.g., see the Stripe globe or the Panic truck (https://www.panic.com/transmit/). I don't want to diminish what's been accomplished here, this is absolutely bleeding edge, state of the art work. But here's an example of what 3D design means in other media (https://vimeo.com/260279525).

Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#47

Post by wetmore »

ArtWomb wrote: post #35

Cool writeup! I agree with this sentiment 100%: "the web is poised to embrace 3D en masse". And with the heady webgl adoption that threejs brings, we see sites with decorative elements that hog resources, inhibit user interactions, and make finding the actual information you are looking for a nightmare. It's a power tool, use it judiciously ;) Post fails to mention how they are actually rendering the "dots". But I fe…

Yeah I thought their counts for the number of dots they could render performantly were pretty low. I suspect they aren't doing any instancing because from what I know about three.js the API for creating instanced geometry is a bit more complicated than creating and using CircleGeometrys as they do in their example. But of course the example could just be a simplified one.

Re: To design and develop an interactive globe

#49

Post by zvorygin »

atonse wrote: post #37
graphene wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell if sarcasm...? What I mean is that the globe should rotate towards the East, not towards the West. This is of course assuming a stationary camera!

Yes and the reply was saying that to the majority of readers (who read left to right), the globe spinning as it does, probably feels more subconsciously comfortable to our minds. It's an artistic interpretation of a globe. It's not meant to be a scientifically accurate representation (one could say that the oceans aren't grey either, or that countries aren't sets of dots, or that the Earth isn't a sphere but an oblon…

This is actually a very intersting tangent! If I visualize interacting with a physical globe, I'm going to spin it left, as if I was "reading" the globe left-to-right. The rotation displayed on the stripe website is not the rotation of the Earth, it's the rotation of a globe!
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