If you've viewed the recently launched Google World Wonders site on a WebGL-capable browser, you might have spotted a fancy spinning globe at the bottom of the screen. This article lets you in on how the globe works and what we used to build it.
To give you a quick overview, the World Wonders globe is a heavily tweaked version of the WebGL Globe by the Google Data Arts Team. We took the original globe, stripped out the bar graph bits, changed the shaders, added fancy clickable HTML markers and Natural Earth continent geometry from Mozilla's GlobeTweeter demo (big thanks to Cedric Pinson!) All to make a nice animated globe that matches the site's color scheme and adds an extra layer of sophistication to the site.
The design brief for the globe was to have a nice-looking animated map with clickable markers placed on top of World Heritage Sites. With that in mind, I started looking for something suitable. The first thing that came to mind was the WebGL Globe built by the Google Data Arts Team. It's a globe and it looks cool. What else do you need, eh?