Jurasasphere - Stardance

1h 57m 44s logged

Update time. I renamed it to Jurasasphere and made the globe actually look alive with real NASA earth texture, stars behind it, a glowing atmosphere. Before it was a black ball floating in a black void, not ideal.
Every fossil record fills itself in from Wikipedia now, so you get a real photo and a normal-English description. Added a button that says the dino’s name out loud (half of them are unpronounceable) plus a hand-drawn sketch of how big it was next to a 1.8m person.
The whole scene reskins to wherever you dug: jungle, desert, polar or plains. And each one actually moves. Snow drifts in the polar one, heat shimmers in the desert, grass sways on the plains. All of it shuts off if you’ve got reduced-motion on.
Also found one bug where the close button just wouldn’t close. Turned out an invisible scroll layer was sitting on top of it eating every click. Fixed it, and made Escape close the panel too.
New stuff to mess with: a surprise me button, shareable links (every record has its own URL), search autocomplete, a near me button that flies to your closest dig, a day/night toggle, and a time scrubber that rewinds the map to one moment in the Mesozoic.

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@hpeen on Jurasasphere · 25 days ago

1h 3m 34s logged

I made Jurassphere, a website with a 3D globe you can spin to explore real dinosaur fossil sites, sort of like Google Earth but for dinosaurs.
For the globe I used a JavaScript library called globe.gl. Then I hooked it up to the Paleobiology Database, a real public science API, so the markers are actual dig sites. There are over 400 of them. Click one and a panel slides in with the dinosaur’s name, its time period, the coordinates, and where it was found.
I also added a backup list of 15 famous dinosaurs in case the API ever goes down, so the site never ends up empty.
I added a filter for the three main periods, a search box that flies the camera to whatever dinosaur you type, an intro animation, and background sound you can turn on or off.
It’s plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no framework. I wrote tests for the data code, and it runs on GitHub Pages: https://hpeen.github.io/Jurassphere/