Published: 30/09/2017

The animation above was built to demonstrate how different the map would look if you changed the point used as (0,0) for longitude, latitude. Click anywhere on the map to rotate to the view given by using that point as the origin, or press "Start Roaming" to rotate between random points.

When we create 2d maps of the globe, we have to decide how to take points on a sphere and embed them in a plane. How we do this is know as a map projection, and no matter which one we chose, something about the representation is always distorted (Relevant XKCD). The goal of this animation is to explore how these distortions look as we change the origin of the map.

The whole thing was built using d3, and is only a slight modification Mike Bostock's World Tour animation. You can find the full code used on github here.