3. Extensibility: Making the world spin, part 1
So I have this idea, but nowhere to start from. A globe is a 3D object, and a computer screen is 2D. The maths to work out how to show 3D objects on a screen is hard!
Thankfully, in computing people have usually done something similar before, and these programs are offered either free or for money for you to adapt and build on. This is a really important principle in computing, called 'extensibility'.
Nowadays there are '3D engines' which you can use, which do the hard work. Fortnite, for example, uses 'Unreal Engine'.
For my website I had a look around the web, and found something called 'planetaryjs'. This was created way back in 2013 by Binary Muse - her real name is Michelle Tilley - here is her programmer profile. She built her program using other people's work again - the 'TopoJSON' world map and the D3 programming library for the 3D. Using these she made a globe for other people to use and customise. This is how it looks -
The good thing for me was that this is a globe you can drag around to explore! Fantastic, it looked like I'd be able to use this globe, and build on it, to do what I wanted. It also used a language I'm quite familiar with, Javascript.
Now I just have to work out how to make the globe do what I want...
Thankfully, in computing people have usually done something similar before, and these programs are offered either free or for money for you to adapt and build on. This is a really important principle in computing, called 'extensibility'.
Nowadays there are '3D engines' which you can use, which do the hard work. Fortnite, for example, uses 'Unreal Engine'.
For my website I had a look around the web, and found something called 'planetaryjs'. This was created way back in 2013 by Binary Muse - her real name is Michelle Tilley - here is her programmer profile. She built her program using other people's work again - the 'TopoJSON' world map and the D3 programming library for the 3D. Using these she made a globe for other people to use and customise. This is how it looks -
The good thing for me was that this is a globe you can drag around to explore! Fantastic, it looked like I'd be able to use this globe, and build on it, to do what I wanted. It also used a language I'm quite familiar with, Javascript.
Now I just have to work out how to make the globe do what I want...
Comments
Post a Comment