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, 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.