Globes are sweet!
When will we get an Oculus Rift (or generic VR) interface for e.g. Google Earth? A virtual globe, with unlimited ability to zoom and add/remove layers, would be great.
…even greater would be a geological version, with 3d maps of the subsurface structures…
Another random thought, this time from physical world… what about a spherical-coord CNC machine for machine-painting such globes (or perhaps CNC-milling the surface structures - while they are fine they could still make quite nice shadow effects)?
Craftsmanship always impresses me. I want one!
Whoah, I’ll take two of these:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/199661009/handmade-celestial-livingstone-world?ref=shop_home_active_11
Wonderful stuff. I love globes, but I’d have to see one in person to pull the trigger on one of these (even if they were in my price range). From the photographs, they all seem to feature colour bleaching along the edges of the individual map strips. This makes those joins very obvious. This bleaching may be an artefact of the traditional process and something that stamps them as “handmade”, but it doesn’t actually appeal to me. I’d prefer a high-quality contemporary style, with the map image on the surface as perfect as could be achieved, even if it required a non-traditional processes.
“Did you ever go to a place - I think it was called Norway? That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges.”
Artisanal globes? Oh, please. That’s so 2014. The new thing to sell to people who have way too much money is craft orreries made with locally smelted metals.
I’ll take two of those as well!
I’d suggest a hollow plastic ball, with the polymer dyed with a laser-active dye, the kind some keyboard keys are made from. (The pigments react to Nd:YAG laser and turn white if black, and gray on white. The Apple keyboards with gray on white are typically laser-scribed this way.)
Then spin the ball and circle the laser around. The rest is software.
With more powerful laser you could even directly inscribe metal. Copper or bronze deposited on such a hollow ball (or, for thick enough layer of metal for structural integrity, completely metallic) would do a nice job here. Copper is however a royal bitch to treat with laser (or plasma or anything) because it is too highly thermally conductive so the heat deposited by the beam spreads around before it can do its job. Stainless steel would work neatly. I can imagine a sphere made of two hemispheres, welded with laser and the joint polished away, then inscribed with a powerful pulsed laser. Could yield an effect similar to gravure/intaglio on the surface of the metal.
Their globe that I linked above is astronomical, and not just in price.
Pfft someone needs to tell her to change that “handmade” to “artisanal” toot suite.
Thinking of something similar.
Actually, the image I want is a “retina quality” photorealistic image of the whole planet but without clouds. As I type, even more cool would be a live OLED shperical screen that could display a whole range of maps (visual/political/geological/ etc etc) with real time day/night/clouds and weather as an option. I have an app on my phone that does some of this in 2D. But directly in UHD on a glowing globe? Yes, yes, that’s what I want. Somebody must be working on it. Screw handmade, artisanal or whatever. I want hi-tech.
I’d go for high-resolution virtual reality. With physical globe you can’t zoom in/out.
He who smelt it…
…Then forged it.
Ohhhhhhh.
I want to do that.
That is beautiful.
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