Hacker News Reader

I keep wanting some sort of dynamic desktop globe, where I can set the maps to basically any era and picture the world back then. See Alexander’s conquests, Rome’s rise etc. Feels like this hardware must be possible at this point?

View on HN

That's an interesting idea. I could see some sort of flexible OLED or something that could change, but the textures to show mountains would be the difficult part. I could see some sort of reverse idea of those desk toys with all of the pins that you can leave the shape of objects in. Only, this would push the pins up/down to change the elevations accordingly. That would be an interesting OLED material that could stretch without stretching the "pixels".

It would probably be easier with projectors in a pyramid at the center, but you would struggle with seams.

Geo-Cosmos at the Miraikan[1] museum in Tokyo comes to mind.

Absolutely stunning.

[1] https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/exhibitions/tsunagari/geo-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com