National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo presents the “world’s first large-scale spherical OLED” and what do you think they display on it? Right!
Cool! As soon as they can do that with bendable OLED panels and thus do away with the gaps in the globe’s surface, I’m sold!
On another note: While I think this is appealing and induces an appropriate “want-to-interact-with-the-globe”-kind-of-feeling, I’m still a strong believer in 2D maps for many purposes. For example, for gaining a global overview or for comparing some characteristic of, for example, Brazil and say India, a globe is just an impractical object. This is because you have to keep turning it back and forth (or, in the above case, if you are not at the controls, run back and forth or up and down) in order to check and compare the two places of interest.
Anyhow, I’ll still write that one onto my wishlist.
Very interesting.
Since 2007 I would like to see a touchscreen-globe. Check out my blog post:
http://www.newsofthefuture.net/index.php?/archives/19-June-16,-2011-Terrestrial-globe-with-touch-screen.html
As you said, 2D Maps have their advantages, but for some use cases a touchscreen globe would surely be suited.
Interesting, thanks for the link.
One thing that came to mind, which is an interesting usability problem (imo): When you zoom in further and further on such a touchscreen globe, what happens? The geometry should gradually approach a plane. What does the globe display, especially the regions which are close to the periphery of your vision. And what happens to the “back side” of the globe? What is displayed there?
It is an interesting design challenge indeed.
One possibility would be to use only a part of the globe for zooming in. The rest of the globe still displays the globe as before.
Another one could be to only use the globe for getting an overview of what’s happening around the globe and then when you want to zoom in, use another screen nearby like a wall-screen or a tablet.
These are interesting suggestions! I’d like to see a prototype implementing that.