Jaanga oSome Globe ~ Full 3D + 18 zoom levels ~ Cookbook Demo Code

For a lot of the time since the Urdacha debacle in April, I have been working with 3D globe models of the earth for the FGx project. These have for the most part been based on the Three.js globe in Chrome Experiments.

This globe has a kind of usefulness in terms of simple DataViz. I think it can be thought of as the 3D equivalent of the pie chart. Great for beginners.

But for almost any other use, the globe code is quite limited.

So I began to think of the globe I would like to have.

The features should include:

• Ability to access all sorts of open source and publicly available data from, say, Open Street Map, MapQuest and Google Maps
• All runs in your browser in a just a few hundred lines of code
• Fully 3D with easy to add and remove 3D assets at runtime
• Eighteen levels of zoom like OSM and Google Maps
• Basic 3D topology for the entire globe
• Full 3D camera controls
• User interface overlay built with a standard library such as jQuery

I'm sure there's more, but in a nutshell I want a simplified Google Map and a Google Earth that I can create and edit using tools made for dummies.

So far I think it's all doable. The link below will take you to Jaanga oSome Globe r2 on GitHub which supports 18 levels of zoom. I am working on r3 and the work on 3D topology is underway.

Link
http://jaanga.github.io/cookbook/osome-globe/r2

First-ever high-resolution images of a molecule as it breaks and reforms chemical bonds

I find these first images of molecular bonding to be very exciting.

You may find this curious, as this is meant to be a data visualization site where reality is modeled but rarely shown for itself.

Look at the image. It shows a single molecule displayed from an orthogonal point of view - and nothing is moving.

What will multiple molecules moving and interacting in 3D look like? For the foreseeable future, my guess is that such complex stuff will have to be modeled rather than photographed.

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-first-ever-high-resolution-images-molecule-reforms.html

We have work to do...