Plotting geocoded tweets on a globe with canvas
I gathered a few hours of geocoded tweets from the twitter streaming api (using the maptime code as a base). This was to explore some ideas that we’d been talking about at White October.
Drawing the globe is relatively straightforward. The lat/long pairs are converted into position vectors, which are then transformed based on the mouse position. The Sylvester library was pretty handy for transforming the points (Pete talked about Sylvester at jsoxford recently).
The original plan was to animate this over a period of time, though it looked quite random/noisy so I went for this static view instead.
Gareth pointed me to a post about the effects in tron legacy which makes me want to make this a lot more awesome!