This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Comfort Food Edition, Perfect Landing
What I Built
The Comfort Atlas is a spinning 3D globe of comfort food from ~100 countries.
Virtually travel the globe and have a taste of the comfort foods from 100~ countries. Moussaka in Greece, Jollof Rice in Nigeria, Pho in Vietnam. There is also a "featured dish of the day" that rotates deterministically so it's the same for everyone visiting that day. And the fun feature: visitors can type in their own comfort dish and generate a downloadable, passport-stamp-style card in one of three color styles.
Demo
https://comfort-atlas.netlify.app/
Journey
I started with a flat SVG world map, clickable countries, keyboard support, a hover tooltip on the map, all built on real
So i decided to try something i have never done before. Make a globe! I used cobe which promised a 3D globe out of the box. First attempt rendered absolutely nothing but floating dots. 😂 With a lot of the help of my friend claude, we found out that their docs are outdated, and there is not a createGlobe() draws exactly one synchronous frame and expects you to drive a requestAnimationFrame loop calling .update() yourself.
Two things on the globe I'm especially proud of, because neither had any library support: a hover tooltip that tracks a marker in 3D space, and a fading "trail" of great-circle arcs between the countries you've visited. Both came down to translating the projection math out of a minified bundle into something readable, then reimplementing it myself.
What I would do next: dark mode.
What I learned: a lot about accessibility in 3D/canvas, which is so much more difficult than the 2d one, one check for a11y is never enough. Maps are hard, and getting something to track a moving 3D object from regular DOM is even harder.
Licensed under MIT
Fun fact: I don't like Moussaka, even though i am greek, my comfort food is Pizza. xD
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