Building a 360° Interactive Globe With Babylon.JS

Virtually Maker Faire 2020

May 22nd-23rd

The aim of the project is to explain how to create 360° interactive pictures with the 3D Babylon.JS JavaScript library.

The project is a response to the lockdown of our FabLab (Créalab, Villeneuve d'Ascq) and the need to provide a pedagogical continuity with its regular students. It leads to the writing of a series of progressive tutorials in programming, ranging from basic skills — such as installing a text editor — to the hacking of snippets to enhance the 3D picture.

The result is a fun pedagogical object and an introduction to virtual reality: a 3D terrestrial globe with parallels, meridians and labels including the names of the continents. Through the exercise, we plunged back in cartography and trigonometrical calculation to convert lat/long coordinates to cartesian XYZ coordinates.

Link to the first tutorial of the series: https://wikis.univ-lille.fr/minilab/les-logiciels/babylon.js/un-globe-terrestre-3d-interactif-avec-babylon.js