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Folding Paper Globes

mapscaping.com

162 pointsBerislavLopac22 comments

One of the most interesting thing with paper globes is that the object becomes very familiar with kids.

They understand it's inexpensive, won't shatter if they drop it so don't fear touching or moving it around, playing with it. They can participate in making, so it becomes more personal. And as there's no stand, it's easy to mess with the orientation. "upside-down" becomes arbitrary, even with text on it, you can discuss inclination, or how it can be seen from completely different perspectives.

It's a very nice object to have around.

I used to make these with a Photoshop plugin called Flexify and high-res imagery available from NASA. I'm surprised that it's still around, and not particularly expensive: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-2.html

I wrote Flexify. It’s got tons of weird paper-model possibilities like sphericons and curved-fold origami. The whole list is here: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-output-modes.html

It's great! I e-mailed you asking about a standalone version. All of your plug-ins are pretty cool. As a kid it was fun to play with them, especially LunarCell and Glitterato, and get results that far exceeded my own artistic abilities. You were really ahead of the curve on procedural generation.

You also once sent me the source code for Despair when I asked about updating it for then-modern systems, but I had no idea anything about C back then.

No example photos of the completed globes?

Edit: found some examples on their blog: https://mapscaping.com/blogs/geo-candy/diy-folding-paper-glo...

What kind of shape does the second-to-last one make?

A spike ball: http://www.flamingpear.com/gallery65.html

The cubic earth made me laugh; I'm currently making a planetary terrain generator which uses a normalised cube to generate spherical terrain, so this was particularly close to home :)

The dymaxion projection works well for this too

And the Waterman Butterfly

https://xkcd.com/977/

Is there any code or published algorithm out there to transform a map into either of these?

D3 does this amazingly well: https://github.com/d3/d3-geo-projection/blob/master/README.m...

Am I the only one that would love to have an eInk globe that I can project arbitrary stuff on?

As an art piece for your house?

not the same but FYI, there is a large globe display at the Museam of the Future in Tokyo. They have contents each year for interesting things to display on them. Unfortunately they only take video, nothing interactive. But still

http://festival.j-mediaarts.jp/en/news/fpaward_entry/

It's not eInk but a spherical screen already exists: https://pufferfishdisplays.com/solution/puffersphere/

https://vimeo.com/212582845 - a skippable version of their video. It's all animated, no real world footage.

Lots and lots of "real" videos of this display are marketing CGI renders, but here's the one from the actual trade show - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGPvfHI-yCE

Weird that they don't trust it to actually display spherical data, and instead drenches it in a flat ticker showing logos...

My university had one in the science building and I played with it a bit. It was able to view various visualizations of data covering the globe (temperature I think might've been one, but I'm near positive weather was also available). They also had imagery of other planets loaded up, so you could spin Mars around to look at different spots.

It's not a very bright display; it is just a projector after all. That video plays pretty well to its strengths in a darker trade show, but in a bright atrium it's much harder to use. It's a little hard to describe, but the "viewing angle" isn't fantastic either. The surface is harder to see than I expected as it gets closer to being perpendicular to your eyes (yeah, obviously, but it seems to lose contrast/brightness or something).

Unless you are a pirate, sailing the foldable paper globes, reserved is spelled with 1 r :-)

This reminded me of another paper globe project, Le Paper Globe: http://joachimesque.com/globe/

For other planets/moons, there's also [1].

[1] Planetary Icosahedrons http://solarviews.com/eng/ico.htm

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