Well, if you’re going for fidelity, the planet is not a perfect sphere. Regardless, a 3D map is harder to parse and render so it makes sense to use 2D.
Eh, a 3D sphere with mapping is quite workable. Bing maps can click over an overly detailed globe and the ‘sphereness’ of it only starts to matter when you zoom out. It’s only a bit of a strain because of the texturing, and it’s not much of a strain at that.
It would not be crazy to have a more accurate interactive behavior instead of assuming that zooming out enough to see continents should still be flattened out.
A very quick turn let’s you see the other half. Bonus, you can look at it from the perspective of a pole and get a much better view of the parts of earth that map projections just utterly mangle. Particularly helpful for understanding arctic geopolitics.
The distortion only applies if you take the screen flatness literally, and no one is going to accuse a 3d game of being hopelessly distorted by virtue of being on a flat screen.
Okay, I’ve turned over the paper and the back side is blank.
I think you miss the point that with a globe, you can’t easily compare different parts of the earth. Do you truly not understand the advantage of being able to see all of the earth at once? Come on, dude.
Even if it were workable, what’s the benefit? This might sound a bit exaggerated but if you move from 2d to 3d and taking into account the number of people constantly looking at a map on their phones, car, etc, you’d be consuming way more energy and seeing absolutely no benefits.
Well, the benefit is this very discussion here, that 2D projections necessarily have distortion on zoom out…
Note that the 2D map is almost certainly already rendered into a 3D context, it’s just how modern graphics are done. Rendering textures to a curved modeled surface for isn’t significantly different than rendering them to a perfectly flat modeled surface.
Even better than Bing maps, if you go to Google maps, click ‘layers’, then click ‘more’ and check ‘globe view’, then you have a google maps that on zoom out just happens to render to sphere instead of 2D. Not the least bit more resource intensive, apples to apples with the same textures that it would have used to build the 2D map but just projected onto a sphere instead.
Directions work fine, at that scale you can’t even see the difference between a globe and a flat map. It’s just zooming it out.
You have to zoom out to see about 500 miles on the screen before the curvature would even be very noticable, and at that point you aren’t caring about the navigation in detail any more.
The one travel related thing is getting a better immediate sense for why a plane or boat runs a particular course which doesn’t make sense on a typical map.
Well, if you’re going for fidelity, the planet is not a perfect sphere. Regardless, a 3D map is harder to parse and render so it makes sense to use 2D.
Eh, a 3D sphere with mapping is quite workable. Bing maps can click over an overly detailed globe and the ‘sphereness’ of it only starts to matter when you zoom out. It’s only a bit of a strain because of the texturing, and it’s not much of a strain at that.
It would not be crazy to have a more accurate interactive behavior instead of assuming that zooming out enough to see continents should still be flattened out.
Okay, you show a globe, or rather, represent a globe on a 2D surface.
Now you cannot have a single map that shows everything. And your 2D representtion is distorted anyway.
A very quick turn let’s you see the other half. Bonus, you can look at it from the perspective of a pole and get a much better view of the parts of earth that map projections just utterly mangle. Particularly helpful for understanding arctic geopolitics.
The distortion only applies if you take the screen flatness literally, and no one is going to accuse a 3d game of being hopelessly distorted by virtue of being on a flat screen.
Okay, I’ve turned over the paper and the back side is blank.
I think you miss the point that with a globe, you can’t easily compare different parts of the earth. Do you truly not understand the advantage of being able to see all of the earth at once? Come on, dude.
Even if it were workable, what’s the benefit? This might sound a bit exaggerated but if you move from 2d to 3d and taking into account the number of people constantly looking at a map on their phones, car, etc, you’d be consuming way more energy and seeing absolutely no benefits.
Well, the benefit is this very discussion here, that 2D projections necessarily have distortion on zoom out…
Note that the 2D map is almost certainly already rendered into a 3D context, it’s just how modern graphics are done. Rendering textures to a curved modeled surface for isn’t significantly different than rendering them to a perfectly flat modeled surface.
Even better than Bing maps, if you go to Google maps, click ‘layers’, then click ‘more’ and check ‘globe view’, then you have a google maps that on zoom out just happens to render to sphere instead of 2D. Not the least bit more resource intensive, apples to apples with the same textures that it would have used to build the 2D map but just projected onto a sphere instead.
Do you care about directions or geography? 99 times out of 100 I think it’ll be the former.
Directions work fine, at that scale you can’t even see the difference between a globe and a flat map. It’s just zooming it out.
You have to zoom out to see about 500 miles on the screen before the curvature would even be very noticable, and at that point you aren’t caring about the navigation in detail any more.
The one travel related thing is getting a better immediate sense for why a plane or boat runs a particular course which doesn’t make sense on a typical map.