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Comment by tomgp | Hacker News Reader

It’s still being projected onto a screen though so you’re still using a projection. There are some pretty extreme trade offs you accept when using a orthographic ‘globe’ projection, not least of which is that you can’t see half the planet for any given moment.

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Since it's three.js you can plug in as many rasterizers, as you have eyes for XR, which makes it distinct from a proper 2D implementation, which would have to fake the arcs: https://observablehq.com/@armollica/globe-with-lofted-arcs

The philosophical question here: is a stereopair of 2 near-orthographic (near side general Projections still a projection, or is it only a globe, if it's tactile?

In general I would prefer the CanvasRenderingContext2D way to handle this simple display use case, since it looks cleaner and more predictable across devices on screen and doesn't keep your gpu busy when not animating anything.

I don't exactly get this argument. It is not only about what you see on screen, I was talking about geographic operations like spatial queries being executed on the globe rather than on a projected 2d surface.

> spatial queries being executed on the globe

But it's perfectly possible to create geodesically-correct buffers, for example - such as you might see when calculating ballistic missile range over thousands of kilometres - in a 2D projection, and indeed this has been available for decades. And we have plenty of global models, such as WGS 84: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System

So what exactly are you talking about?

So do you think there is no benefit if we can avoid projections entirely? Also won't using 3d make working with great-circle paths easier?

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