Google+ Activity on WebGL Rendered Globe = Beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Activity on WebGL Rendered Globe = Beautiful

gplusglobe.com

83 pointsrkalla23 comments

Another three.js globe project, pulling from the site's Google Analytics:

Ok that is stunning but as far as the functionality it seems totally lacking... like they could do so much more with such a beautiful platform.

This is based off of the dat.globe, a project from Google's Data Vis people: http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/

Interestingly, Paris is where G+ is more used!

It's just a map of people who have added themselves, it has little if nothing to do with the actual distribution of G+ users. The project was created by three people in Paris which explains why it's the leader.

Looks like there are only a few thousand people. If HN'ers add themselves, we'll probably skew it. In fact, it might become of a HN Globe.

I find these visualizations pretty cool, and I forked the original WebGL globe demo to support real time activity. Check it out at https://github.com/zsolt/globestats . It uses node.js + socket.io for the sample server.

This is beautiful. We did similar stuff using a Flash globe a long while ago. I know that a firm I worked with did this for Bob Dylan's site as well.

If animated, it'd make a good lobby visualization somewhere.

Well, this completely crashed my MacBook Pro. Although to be fair, I think it has to do with the fairly unreliable graphics card/drivers than anything else.

Runs beautifully on mine. How old is yours?

Late 2008. Soon to be replaced, and a bit behind on the OS too.

I've had no end of problems with the graphics card and graphics card drivers on this model-- both times I've brought it in to be serviced the Apple techs have simply nodded and had the machine sent in for a new logic board without even testing. I guess NVida produced a terrible batch of GPU's that Apple used on these models.

this is actually like https://mozillademos.org/demos/globetweeter/demo.html

which has been released a few month ago

That's not quite as polished and visually stunning, though.

maybe it doesn't look as visually impressive, but actually in that twitter globe all the country borders are vector mapped.. whereas the google+ one is just a bitmap map of the world. Either way I'm liking that there are more of these WebGL 3D apps popping up.

I see the globe, but I don't see how it's visually showing the number of tweets.

Nice. By the looks of it Paris is by far the city with the most g+ users..

Cool - worked great in Firefox 8 Beta on my Ubuntu laptop.

It would be interesting to also see activity per capita.

Wouldn't load on my MacBook Pro under in Chrome.

Weird. Works great on my (moderately old) MacBook with Chrome.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of video card is your MacBook running (integrated or discrete)?

No integrated graphics, NVidia 9400M / NVidia 9600M GT

Seems to work fine on my mid-2010 MBP in Chrome, running Snow Leopard.

Could do with a little more contrast on the globe, though...

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