alt.hn

7/29/2026 at 5:53:00 AM

Folding Paper Globes

 https://foldingglobes.com/globes

by dango2506

8/2/2026 at 4:42:44 PM

They could get 10% bigger globes out of the same sheet of paper by rotating the icosahedron a bit (14º)

by tln

8/2/2026 at 5:03:20 PM

one of my favourite hacker news quotes. what makes this forum great.

by manc_lad

8/3/2026 at 5:16:56 AM

Why not 30°? Is 14° as far as you can turn before the ends of icosahedron hit the top and bottom of the landscape sheet of paper?

by divbzero

8/2/2026 at 7:08:47 PM

Flexify (http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-2.html) is an incredible decades-old Photoshop plugin for making these. I made a mobile for a grade school math project using Flexify and NASA's equirectangular planetary maps, turning Mercury into a tetrahedron, Venus a pentahedron, etc.

The gallery of output projections is neat: http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify-output-modes.html

by rgovostes

8/2/2026 at 9:27:48 PM

That's slick. I use papermodel+Blender for my models, but I haven't bit the UV mapping bullet yet!

by MengerSponge

8/2/2026 at 6:20:24 PM

Neat. For folks who are more comfortable with using the terminal than paying for things, I have used this python libraries to make isospheres from 360 photographs: https://github.com/Teque5/pydymax

by blululu

8/2/2026 at 8:04:55 PM

That sounds really cool, can you expand a bit on the workflow you used: what format were the 360 pictures in and how did you convert that into data that this Python library uses ?

by andrehacker

8/2/2026 at 5:19:27 PM

Try interrupted sinusoidal, ot will be less edgy.

https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/interrupted-sinusoidal/

This is a beautiful site. Don't miss it if you haven't been there before

by srean

8/3/2026 at 1:37:32 AM

https://observablehq.com/@mxfh/a-papercraft-friendly-world-m...

I made a custom projection once, that's a bit friendlier to fold and comes in one tile.

Has no rendered flaps, but you should get the idea where to place them.

Still somewhat stiff, but managed to actually build two of them, would recommend printing on heavy A3 sheets or bigger.

Anyone is welcome to iterate. There even is a todo list with obvious things to improve upon.

by mxfh

8/3/2026 at 3:54:43 AM

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I haven't looked at the pointed site yet but will do once I get some time on my hands. Maps end up nerd-sniping me.

The offset to prevent tears is a nice touch.

by srean

8/3/2026 at 10:31:34 AM

The offset also forces the gore to be bent in two directions, so it’s also bit tricky, and makes the gore stiffer then it needs to be, dampening the paper there certainly helps.

by mxfh

8/2/2026 at 5:28:35 PM

TFA has the option to do the same thing. Default TFA page shows the free option. The less edgy options are for not free but available.

by dylan604

8/2/2026 at 6:00:19 PM

You are indeed correct. The options are to be found here

https://foldingglobes.com/pricing

For those who want some more, try making a globe by hand. It is instructive and a lot of fun.

by srean

8/2/2026 at 4:20:55 PM

Neat! There's a notable omission though--none of the earth globes look like earth does from space, with true color* AND clouds. A while ago I got really into making paper globes because I wanted one like that and I couldn't find one I liked. I asked Claude to write a script to generate a net out of this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250316112538/https://visibleea... Instead of an isocahedron, I used gores like a real globe. This approximates a sphere using intersecting cylindrical surfaces (not sure what the term for that solid is!) I made a bunch but usually they came out pretty lumpy, here's the best one: https://imgur.com/a/eikGrTW

*Edit: I also couldn't find a good point of reference for what "true color Earth" even looks like. Different photos/satellites seem to have notably different color calibration, just google "blue marble" and you'll see. And this isn't even getting into the weeds about atmospheric effects, which appear strongest near the limb... obviously there's no way to replicate that on a globe!

by fwipsy

8/2/2026 at 2:23:02 PM

Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.

by jsherer

8/2/2026 at 3:22:43 PM

Borders are a nightmare because many countries have contested areas and ask everyone inside the country to use the official one, specialy at schools.

by gus_massa

8/2/2026 at 7:03:41 PM

Too late to edit: As a sibling comment says, in the top of the site they offer an option to make a version with only the borders. I don't see an option to combine satellite photos and borders anyway.

by gus_massa

8/2/2026 at 3:57:52 PM

I do find it interesting that while modern map apps do a great job of replacing road atlases, and we can get satellite and photogrammetry overlays that give us immense insight into how maps relate to the context on the ground, and we do have pretty good topographic mapping apps (though sadly not built in to the big map apps like Google or Apple), but one kind of map that we used to get in paper atlases but can’t explore so easily online are political maps. Google Maps is also not great as a physical map in that it is bad at labelling and naming geographic features - Apple Maps does a better job at this. But neither offers a good way to hide all the roads and just look at borders.

by jameshart

8/2/2026 at 5:31:20 PM

"or with your own pinned places via the custom globe builder."

Right there at the top of the page with a link even: https://foldingglobes.com/

In fact, it looks like the default landing page for the site. TFA looks to be a quick link to the free options

by dylan604

8/2/2026 at 8:13:18 PM

I hear you, but I'm suggesting a preconfigured one like the others that are linked here.

by jsherer

8/2/2026 at 11:40:18 PM

by pre-configured, I'm reading as free since all of them are pre-configured and are just a button click away.

by dylan604

8/2/2026 at 6:12:23 PM

The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.

by andrewl

8/3/2026 at 3:00:14 AM

Another thing I miss in common digital maps is the use of typeface sizes and weight to approximate city populations. There are many other ones, like toll road, multi-lane, two lane, paved, unpaved, under construction/washed out, as well as better communication of biome characteristics like forest, marsh, swamp, desert, farmland, lava flow, (plus the usual parks, preserves, wilderness, etc.)

Paper maps communicated a lot of different information, not only things about roadways. It's like roadmaps are the only maps the common online digital maps cared to build digitally.

Their keys and icons were so much better.

by mc32

8/2/2026 at 4:02:49 PM

I would like to see some pictures of the final product, seems very cool

by atum47

8/2/2026 at 7:01:35 PM

Interesting idea, but are there any photos of the assembled globes anywhere? I’m on mobile but I can’t seem to find an example on the site.

by Aurornis

8/2/2026 at 4:03:46 PM

very cool. as someone not familiar with this I would love to see how they look when folded

by nnnnico

8/2/2026 at 7:04:34 PM

That they don't show how they look when folded is either bizarre, or that the end results are disappointing.

by peterleiser

8/2/2026 at 4:53:36 PM

it's a good idea, but it uses the distorted Mercator projection, and then cuts it so that you can glue it back into a somewhat globe-like shape.

it's distorted, twice.

by attila-lendvai

8/2/2026 at 7:06:41 PM

Are you sure? Greenland looks quite small and in https://foldingglobes.com/ there is an option to print the borders with parallels and meridians and they are split and curved.

by gus_massa

8/2/2026 at 2:41:19 PM

Earth without water seems a bit deceptive.

by yreg

8/3/2026 at 8:31:32 AM

Great!

> Meteorite Landings

There seem to be significantly more of those on the northern hemisphere. I wonder what might be the reason for that?

by zombot

8/2/2026 at 3:47:29 PM

this is awesome !

by ls1911

8/3/2026 at 11:41:43 AM

[dead]

by imnotr0b0t

8/3/2026 at 12:56:33 AM

[dead]

by aaron695