Web 3D

I've long been a fan of POV-Ray. Later Second Life. Someone pegged me once saying that I was good at doing "procedurally generated structure". True. I've been fond of writing boxes that, when clicked, generated anything from sim-spanning race-tracks to shopping malls to near-earth space.

Moons of Saturn

I was inspired by some cleaned up maps by Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. They are pretty, but the problem is whenever you represent a spherical surface with a flat one there is distortion. I've spent a lot of time working with this problem. My favorite answer is the HEALPix representation. Wherever possible I use this for my own generated maps. However, Paul's maps are constructed using the Mercator projection, which distorts the poles. I try to balance this out by projecting it onto a sphere. That gives you a distortion free result. But because the image data is not evenly distributed, it is still a little wonky at the poles.