Hacker News

Folding Paper Globes

121 points by dango2506 ago | 27 comments

rgovostes |next [-]

Flexify (http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-2.html) is an incredible decades-old Photoshop plugin for making these. I made a mobile for a grade school math project using Flexify and NASA's equirectangular planetary maps, turning Mercury into a tetrahedron, Venus a pentahedron, etc.

The gallery of output projections is neat: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-output-modes.html

srean |root |parent [-]

The author of Flexify is

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lloydb

tln |next |previous [-]

They could get 10% bigger globes out of the same sheet of paper by rotating the icosahedron a bit (14º)

manc_lad |root |parent [-]

one of my favourite hacker news quotes. what makes this forum great.

blululu |next |previous [-]

Neat. For folks who are more comfortable with using the terminal than paying for things, I have used this python libraries to make isospheres from 360 photographs: https://github.com/Teque5/pydymax

andrehacker |root |parent [-]

That sounds really cool, can you expand a bit on the workflow you used: what format were the 360 pictures in and how did you convert that into data that this Python library uses ?

fwipsy |next |previous [-]

Neat! There's a notable omission though--none of the earth globes look like earth does from space, with true color* AND clouds. A while ago I got really into making paper globes because I wanted one like that and I couldn't find one I liked. I asked Claude to write a script to generate a net out of this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250316112538/https://visibleea... Instead of an isocahedron, I used gores like a real globe. This approximates a sphere using intersecting cylindrical surfaces (not sure what the term for that solid is!) I made a bunch but usually they came out pretty lumpy, here's the best one: https://imgur.com/a/eikGrTW

*Edit: I also couldn't find a good point of reference for what "true color Earth" even looks like. Different photos/satellites seem to have notably different color calibration, just google "blue marble" and you'll see. And this isn't even getting into the weeds about atmospheric effects, which appear strongest near the limb... obviously there's no way to replicate that on a globe!

jsherer |next |previous [-]

Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.

dylan604 |root |parent |next [-]

"or with your own pinned places via the custom globe builder."

Right there at the top of the page with a link even: https://foldingglobes.com/

In fact, it looks like the default landing page for the site. TFA looks to be a quick link to the free options

jsherer |root |parent [-]

I hear you, but I'm suggesting a preconfigured one like the others that are linked here.

jameshart |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I do find it interesting that while modern map apps do a great job of replacing road atlases, and we can get satellite and photogrammetry overlays that give us immense insight into how maps relate to the context on the ground, and we do have pretty good topographic mapping apps (though sadly not built in to the big map apps like Google or Apple), but one kind of map that we used to get in paper atlases but can’t explore so easily online are political maps. Google Maps is also not great as a physical map in that it is bad at labelling and naming geographic features - Apple Maps does a better job at this. But neither offers a good way to hide all the roads and just look at borders.

gus_massa |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Borders are a nightmare because many countries have contested areas and ask everyone inside the country to use the official one, specialy at schools.

gus_massa |root |parent [-]

Too late to edit: As a sibling comment says, in the top of the site they offer an option to make a version with only the borders. I don't see an option to combine satellite photos and borders anyway.

andrewl |root |parent |previous [-]

The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.

atum47 |next |previous [-]

I would like to see some pictures of the final product, seems very cool

thadk |next |previous [-]

fil's AirOcean projection on the original ObservableHQ is a fun starting point for rendering your own such map in Javascript from scratch:

https://observablehq.com/@fil/airocean-projection

The source data is down for my vector tile remix of it but here is a screenshot: https://static.observableusercontent.com/thumbnail/0fac8a928... and the code: https://observablehq.com/@thadk/reprojecting-vector-tiles

I did it as a little MapTime project in 2019 or so.

Aurornis |next |previous [-]

Interesting idea, but are there any photos of the assembled globes anywhere? I’m on mobile but I can’t seem to find an example on the site.

srean |next |previous [-]

Try interrupted sinusoidal, ot will be less edgy.

https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/interrupted-sinusoidal/

This is a beautiful site. Don't miss it if you haven't been there before

dylan604 |root |parent [-]

TFA has the option to do the same thing. Default TFA page shows the free option. The less edgy options are for not free but available.

srean |root |parent [-]

You are indeed correct. The options are to be found here

https://foldingglobes.com/pricing

For those who want some more, try making a globe by hand. It is instructive and a lot of fun.

nnnnico |next |previous [-]

very cool. as someone not familiar with this I would love to see how they look when folded

peterleiser |root |parent [-]

That they don't show how they look when folded is either bizarre, or that the end results are disappointing.

attila-lendvai |next |previous [-]

it's a good idea, but it uses the distorted Mercator projection, and then cuts it so that you can glue it back into a somewhat globe-like shape.

it's distorted, twice.

gus_massa |root |parent [-]

Are you sure? Greenland looks quite small and in https://foldingglobes.com/ there is an option to print the borders with parallels and meridians and they are split and curved.

yreg |next |previous [-]

Earth without water seems a bit deceptive.

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ls1911 |next |previous [-]

this is awesome !

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