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18 comments

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hudster
well I'm hypnotised
RaSoJo
Me too. My mind went into a tangent of space travel and hikers docking in from far off planets. Then I shook myself awake with the reality of it just being web traffic. deep sigh :(
lloeki
I've seen many 3d globes spinning around with day/night shadowing, but the mere inclusion of the sun (however simple, as it is here with a fake lens flare effect) makes it feel so much more real and less uncanny.
jianshen
The sun totally took me by surprise. I work with folks on other continents and it would be amazing to see a timelapse visualization of check-ins on this thing in relation to the sun.
RyanMcGreal
Not a lot of Team Fortress players on the African continent.
axx
Great! :)
tudorizer
These guys keep on coming with great looking stuff. Very cool.
ger_phpmagazin
Practical application to be doubted due to bad cost/revenue relation.
jstalin
How accurate is the seasonality of the earth's tilt?
simontabor
It's way more accurate than necessary... like seriously crazy
daviding
From the source:

    function sunAngle(timeFromNow){
      // Don't try to understand this. It's taken from a NASA thing. I don't know how it works
:)
sp4ke
Do you plan to open source the code used for this visualization ?
davidwparker
It's built with Three.js, which is already Open Source. The actual code they use isn't super difficult to grasp- take a look at the source. Server-side, however, is a whole different ball game.
simontabor
There's no server side code at all for this - we're planning on open sourcing our labs section as well soon (and doing more labs projects, of course)
dutchbrit
I created the same thing a while back, but using the following globe: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe

I quite liked using the spikes to show traffic volume.

Very cool globe though, love how smooth it is compared to the one I mentioned above & the lens flare!!!

afaqurk
Very cool. Just gave it a test-drive with my company's domain. It seems visually spectacular and data-rich. Most importantly, the trends feature is logically organized with quick renderings of charts/textual data as needed.

Great work. Might just talk management into signing up for out other domains too!

snogglethorpe
Argh, the usual webGL problem: "Your browser doesn't support webGL. Sadface :("

... despite webGL working fine in this browser (chrome) in the past...sometimes... ><

[Sometimes it's due to bogus browser detection, but usually that tends to be "chrome OK! everything else FAIL!"]