Tesseract

After posting the odd black ball floating in space, I was reminded of the Tesseract... just as mesmerising.

Topographic Map of the world.

Topographic Map of the World released by NASA and Japan

This map shows the topography of the world... this may be useful when mapping the 2D Ptolomy map on a 3D plane.

And

Some of this, particularly at the start is perfect for what I'm going through though I'd like to keep to the single map and have the other elements be tightly controlled by the underlying map system.

3D animated transition

This is more the style I'd be after with my map animation. Although I'm obviously not intending of launching into a video sequence.

Animated Map : From Gurun Kedah To Ipoh Perak

The part I like here is the title sequence, it shows a very darkened background, this might be a way of highlighting that we don't really know what's past certain points, eg. edge of china and parts of africa in the ptolomy map. I liked the clarity of the rest of the video but would have liked to have the names of places be standing up 3D letters that projected a shadow onto the surface... I wonder whether you can have a light system that only impacts the text elements... Can you have text elements?

Map Animation Reel 2009

The cloud effects when flying over these 2D maps give an interesting effect, I think I should include such elements when I do my map. The zoom in feature at the end was also very nice.