I've seen many 3d globes spinning around with day/night shadowing, but the mere inclusion of the sun (however simple, as it is here with a fake lens flare effect) makes it feel so much more real and less uncanny.

I created the same thing a while back, but using the following globe: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe

I quite liked using the spikes to show traffic volume.

Very cool globe though, love how smooth it is compared to the one I mentioned above & the lens flare!!!

Very cool. Just gave it a test-drive with my company's domain. It seems visually spectacular and data-rich. Most importantly, the trends feature is logically organized with quick renderings of charts/textual data as needed.

Great work. Might just talk management into signing up for out other domains too!

Not a lot of Team Fortress players on the African continent.

Hey, where are the aliens? I want UFO: Enemy Unknown[1] clone in the browser!

(not to be confused with XCOM: Enemy Unknown[2])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM:_Enemy_Unknown

Argh, the usual webGL problem: "Your browser doesn't support webGL. Sadface :("

... despite webGL working fine in this browser (chrome) in the past...sometimes... ><

[Sometimes it's due to bogus browser detection, but usually that tends to be "chrome OK! everything else FAIL!"]

Do you plan to open source the code used for this visualization ?

How accurate is the seasonality of the earth's tilt?

    function sunAngle(timeFromNow){
      // Don't try to understand this. It's taken from a NASA thing. I don't know how it works

These guys keep on coming with great looking stuff. Very cool.

well I'm hypnotised

Great! :)

Practical application to be doubted due to bad cost/revenue relation.