Setup

To run, you need the Python library Flask installed. If you have pip - the Python package manager installed, you can install Flask by:

pip install Flask

Then, you are ready to start a local server to serve the program to your browser. Do this by switching directory into src (where the code is), and start the server.

cd src
python3 -m http.server 8000

You should now be able to view the globe by navigating to a browser and opening the address: 127.0.0.1:8000

Central libraries

The program makes extensive use of the Javascript Three.js 3D library:

https://threejs.org/

Program structure

The main code is residing within the src directory. The entry point is index.html, and the bulk of the actual javascript code controlling the globe resides in the globe.js file.

The data

The data with coordinates and information about the points are stored in the src/js/data.js file. Here, each entry contains information about a particular site. The latLong part is the central used to locate it on the globe. Other than that, most of the information is used when displaying information by clicking the centers.

If you want to add or remove information from the globe, the easiest way is probably to make a copy of this, and then edit the data.js file directly. You could also likely relatively easily setup a parser converting your data to this JSON format.

The globe.js file

The code is somewhat unorganized hackathon code, but roughly follows the outline:

• Shaders, which are used for visual effects
• Variable setup
• Initialization function calls init(); plotData(); and animate();
• The init() function which:
  • Initializes scene, camera, shaders, mesh and materials
  • Creates a renderer
  • Adds event listeners allowing mouse interactions
• loadSetupFromURL is special function allowing starting looking at certain position based on parameters received from URL
• plotData() assign new dot to the map based on data read from JSON file
• addPoint() called by plotData() and is used to do the actual point generation, adding it to the geometry, and returning a reference to the point
• render() update the view (camera and automatic rotation of the globe)
• updateProjectInfo() updates information by retrieving data from JSON file containing information about the particular datapoint
• emptyProjectInfo() clears out the fields so that no data is shown
• makePositionURL() used to generate URL which can be used to view particular site

Debugging

If something goes wrong, you can often get hits about it by navigating to the browser terminal. In Chrome, you can easily open this by pressing F12.

Resources

Sample code based on: https://newnaw.com/pub/js/webglglobe/worldelevation/