Turn satellite imagery into a paper globe you fold yourself

dango2506 77 points 27 comments August 10, 2026
foldingglobes.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (14 comments)

AmazingEveryDay

Some interesting comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093845

hahahaa

6.95 or point my LLM at the site and copy the simple idea.

pimlottc

The icons for the different shapes don’t really make a lot of sense. It’s not really obvious how some of them work and many are quite unlike the actual pattern (which you have to scroll down to see on mobile). Also Cahill–Keyes M, which I’ve never heard of or seen before, is described as “the classic M”. That’s not really helpful.

monegator

neat idea. hate the vibecoded website. Not even changing the default colors.

Max-q

Icosahedron is the classic? I have never ever seen an icosahedron globe in my life, neither real or digital. What in the world happened in the brain or artificial neural network when that title was picked for an icosahedron “globe”?

Snoeprol

Website is a bit scuffed on mobile

bbor

This is pretty great! To the creator(s) if they’re around in here: if you’ve ever dreamed of a smooth, unified transition between the product’s actual scan .svg and the 3D simulation[1], I have some old code[2] for simulating origami paper folding in three.js that could handle this elegantly. It works by drawing faces based on rotating springs at each edge, anchored at two points each and executed in a (hierarchical) procedure. The repo’s in a messy state of primarily-artificial cleanup atm (fml tbh, btw) but it should be trivial to pull out the parts you’d need for a one-off & one-step sim like this. Apologies if obvious lol — it’s getting harder and harder these days to judge that [1] obviously get why you’re not loading 3D on pageload, so worth pointing out that the same might be possible here with a clever .svg<->.ts swap. [2]: https://gitlab.com/doering-ai/apps/origami

askvictor

This was up a week ago

JR1427

Good on you for creating something fun, but vibing something up and then trying to charge for it, when anyone else could produce the same product for less, is poor taste.

zkmon

Do people still buy .. globes?

mkurz

Now that we have foldable phones, is there a (round) digital globe (like the classic ones) which I can control with an app and for example show me the current world map with "live" weather and all flights from flight radar? If such a globe would exist I would buy one even for a couple of thousand dollars. Just to have all kinds of "live" maps directly in front of me on my desk.

ShinyLeftPad

> No pins yet — your globe works fine without them, but a “you are here” makes it a gift. (in exasperation) How does that make it a gift?

jokoon

win10, firefox freezing for no reason

jareklupinski

looking at Cahill-Keyes M, i wonder if there's a projection that tries to get most accurate land area, but takes liberties with the distance between land masses / ocean / sea sizes

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