ImageSphere
This example displays a three-dimensional globe with pan and zoom, showing a detailed world map texture on a sphere. It uses the Three.js library with `SphereGeometry` and `MeshBasicMaterial` to render the Earth, applying a texture loaded from an external image source. The camera is set with a `PerspectiveCamera` at a distance of one unit, and an animation loop continuously rotates the sphere on the X and Y axes to create a slow, spinning effect. The scene is rendered via `WebGLRenderer` with antialiasing, and the visualization automatically adapts to the browser window size. The underlying data is a static map texture rather than the city-point dataset referenced in the README.
AI-generated descriptionA globe with pan & zoom showing circles for each city of over 100,000 inhabitants. Data from Geonames, preprocessed. The same data is used in World City Explorer.
Uses world-110m and world-50m geographic shapes from TOPOJSON World Atlas.
Inspired by
forked from <a href='http://bl.ocks.org/curran/'>curran</a>'s block: <a href='http://bl.ocks.org/curran/0bb64d8f56042e2480c908b0985f063b'>Orthographic Zoom III</a>
Imported to VizHub from bl.ocks.org: Cities on the Globe