Drawing coastlines…
Terra Vitrea
Optical crystal sphere · gilt coastlines drawn from Natural Earth · 180 mm
The 180 mm is the 3-D model, not a real globe. Nothing here is for sale.
Interactive globe. When it has focus, the arrow keys turn it, Shift and an arrow key turns it further, Enter or Space drops a pin at the point it is facing, and Escape lifts every pin. The place the globe is facing is named below it, under Facing. A written description of the piece and the full list of controls are further down this page, under About this piece.
About this piece
Terra Vitrea is a browser rendering of an optical-crystal globe. A transmissive glass sphere carries the world’s coastlines raised on its surface as gilt tubes, and it sits on paper rather than floating, so the gilding casts a faint map of itself onto the ground beneath.
The coastlines are not a picture painted onto the sphere. They are built as geometry from Natural Earth’s 1:110m country boundaries — 177 outlines, resampled and swept into tubes at load — which is why they catch the light along their length and why the glass refracts the ones on the far side. The studio lighting is a gradient painted onto a canvas in the browser and prefiltered into an environment map, so no photograph, texture, font or script is fetched from anywhere else: every file this page asks for is served from this origin.
It is a study, not a product. There is no shop, no price and no globe that can be delivered. The 180 mm named at the top of the page is the diameter of the model inside the scene, where the sphere is built at a radius of 0.09 units and one unit is read as a metre.
Controls
The same globe answers to a wheel, a hand and a keyboard.
- Wheel or trackpad
- Sideways turns the globe east and west; up and down rolls it north and south. A diagonal swipe does both at once.
- Ctrl and wheel
- Moves the globe nearer or further. On a trackpad this is the pinch gesture.
- Drag
- Takes hold of the surface and turns it one to one. Let go while still moving and the globe keeps spinning.
- Click
- Drops a pin where you clicked. Click a pin again to lift it.
- Tab
- Moves focus onto the globe. A ring is drawn around it while it holds focus, and the keys below then apply.
- Arrow keys
- Turn the globe. Hold Shift for a larger step.
- Enter or Space
- Drops a pin at the point the globe is facing — the place named under “Facing”.
- Esc
- Lifts every pin at once.
- Lift
- Each pin in the list carries its own button, so one pin can be removed without a pointer.
Data & credits
- Coastlines and country outlines — Natural Earth 1:110m cultural vectors, 177 features, delivered as TopoJSON and served from this origin.
- Rendering — three.js r184, MIT licensed, served from this origin.
- Topology — topojson-client 3.1.0, copyright 2019 Mike Bostock, served from this origin.
- Design and code — Vika Taylor. Written up on YouTube; the rest of the network is at vikataylor.com.
The place names in the readout come from the same Natural Earth file. Where the globe is facing open water the readout names the ocean basin only: sea boundaries are conventions rather than geometry, and this page does not pretend to know them.