设计和开发一个互动地球仪

As humans, we’re driven to build models of our world.

作为人类，我们被驱使着为我们的世界建立模型。

A traditional globemaker molds a sphere, mounts it on an axle, balances it with hidden weights, and precisely applies gores—triangular strips of printed earth—to avoid overlap and align latitudes. Cartographers face unenviable trade-offs when making maps. They can either retain the shape of countries, but warp their size—or maintain the size of countries, but contort their shape. In preserving one aspect of our world, they distort another.

一个传统的地球仪制作者会塑造一个球体，将其安装在一个轴上，用隐藏的砝码来平衡它，并精确地应用打印地球的三角条，以避免重叠并对齐纬度。制图师在制作地图时面临着令人羡慕的权衡。他们要么保留国家的形状，但扭曲其大小，要么保留国家的大小，但扭曲其形状。在保留我们世界的一个方面时，他们扭曲了另一个方面。

These are terrestrial globe gores reissued by Giuseppe di Rossi in 1615.

这些是朱塞佩-迪-罗西在1615年重新发行的陆地地球仪。

As visual designers and software engineers, we’re modeling a piece of the world every time we build software. In some cases, it’s the entire world—and that digital world is animated and interactive. There are tools that render 3D objects on the web, but they’re considered sorcery by many. And conjuring that magic doesn’t come without sweat. In WebGL, displaying a single triangle—like a globemaker’s gore—with no lights, textures, interactivity, or motion requires 50+ lines of code.

作为视觉设计师和软件工程师，我们每次构建软件时都在为世界的某个部分建模。在某些情况下，它是整个世界，而且这个数字世界是动画和互动的。有一些工具可以在网络上渲染3D物体，但它们被许多人认为是巫术。而变出这种魔法并不是不费吹灰之力的。在WebGL中，显示一个单一的三角形，就像一个球状物体的内脏，没有灯光、纹理、互动性或运动，需要50多行代码。

For the new stripe.com, we built a 1:40 million-scale, interactive 3D model of the earth. We wanted to convey the interconnected nature of the internet economy and the global scale of our service, while acknowledging how much ground is yet to be covered. Despite expansion to 40 countries and payment processing from 195 countries, we grapple with the complexity of cross-border operations and expansion every day.

对于新的stripe.com，我们建立了一个1:4千万规模的互动式三维地球模型。我们希望传达互联网经济的相互关联性和我们服务的全球规模，同时承认还有很多地方需要覆盖。尽管已经扩展到40个国家，并从195个国家进行支付处理，但我们每天都在努力应对跨境业务和扩张的复杂性。

We set out to build a globe that inspires a sense of awe, invites peopl...