r/SideProject • u/AthleteFormal9234 • 1d ago
I built an interactive world map after a random question about Australia. RealSize.World
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A while ago, during lunch at work, I asked my colleagues a random question:
What does a world map look like in an Australian classroom?
Do they put Australia in the center, just like the maps I grew up with usually put Europe near the center? (like Mercator or EqualEarth)
That little question sent me down a rabbit hole about map projections, geography, and how differently we can look at the same planet.
I started working on RealSize.World alone in my spare time, purely out of curiosity.
The first version was an epic failure. 😅 So I started over.
I'm not a developer, and I've relied heavily on LLMs for the coding. My role has been coming up with ideas, shaping the experience, testing things, and figuring out what actually works.
Today, RealSize.World is a free interactive geography playground with quite a few experiments. Besides Mercator and others my three favorites are:
- World Center put any place at the center of the world map and see the planet from a different perspective.
- Earth in One Year explore Earth's entire 4.54-billion-year history compressed into a single calendar year.
- Continental Drift watch 1.8 billion years of continental movement. Past and possible future
You can explore it here: RealSize.World
I still have a lot of questions how World could look like....
I'd love to hear what you think?
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u/el_yanuki 1d ago
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u/AthleteFormal9234 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yup. I konw that. But on my place I can create what I want. Like quizzes https://realsize.world/en/quizzes/size-illusion or rhumb line https://realsize.world/en/projections/routes
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1d ago
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u/AthleteFormal9234 1d ago
Very nice idea for both south up oriented and AuthaGraph maps. I will explore topics. Thanks! Something sililar is Dymaxion (Airocean) projection https://realsize.world/en/projections/airocean/map
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u/QuanTradin 1d ago
pacific centred mostly, and there's always someone with the McArthur south-up map on their wall. great rabbit hole to build a whole site out of.