June 8, 2026
Globe drama goes fully platonic
Spherical Voronoi Diagram
Math nerds lose it over a globe map toy that’s weirdly beautiful and slightly broken
TLDR: This project turns points on a globe into map-like regions and shows off a surprisingly pretty way to slice up the world. Commenters were split between loving the mathy beauty, joking about platonic solids, and grumbling that mobile controls make the demo hard to actually use.
A work-in-progress globe tool for drawing territories around points has quietly turned into catnip for the comments section. The basic idea is simple: drop points on a sphere, and the program splits the globe into regions showing which point each area is closest to. Very neat, very visual, very "wait, why is this so hypnotic?" The creator says it’s still unfinished, with some edge cases not handled yet, but that did not stop people from immediately going full fan-club mode.
The strongest reaction was plain old awe. One commenter called it "Beautiful :)", while others instantly spiraled into bigger dreams: spherical geometry, hyperbolic geometry, turtle graphics on a globe, and a love letter to the dodecahedron/icosahedron duo that got described as "entirely platonic"—which is peak math-flirting energy. Another person brought receipts with an old Jason Davies map, saying similar tricks can make maps look uncannily close to real political borders. Suddenly this wasn’t just a geometry demo; it was a mini identity crisis for maps.
And yes, there was drama. One user said the "United States of Voronoi" graphic is yet another reminder that the Mercator projection messes with everyone’s brain, while another hit the brakes with a brutally practical complaint: on Firefox for Android, rotating the globe also scrolls the page, making it annoying to use. So the vibe was clear: stunning idea, delightful nerd chaos, but please fix mobile before the comments unionize.
Key Points
- •The article presents a Voronoi diagram defined on the surface of a globe approximated as a sphere.
- •Each Voronoi region consists of points closer to one seed point than to any other seed.
- •The implementation uses a randomized incremental algorithm to compute the 3D convex hull of spherical points.
- •The article states that the 3D convex hull of spherical points is equivalent to the spherical Delaunay triangulation.
- •The implementation is incomplete, with remaining work including handling coplanar points and displaying the spherical convex hull.