Mission Briefing

For this mission, we are going to create a spinning neon globe starting with the mesh of a sphere. We are then going to add some lights to make our sphere smooth. We will then add a world map texture to our sphere to turn it into a spinning globe. Finally, we'll use some filters using the shader framework that has been added in Processing 2 to add a glow effect similar to the vector displays of an early arcade cabinet or the displays in an old James Bond movie.

And because we don't live in the 80s any longer, we will add the ability to switch our globe to a modern satellite image display as well.

Why Is It Awesome?

This mission gives us the opportunity to explore the awesome 3D capabilities of Processing. We start with a simple wireframe model of a sphere, and then learn how to light the scene and texture our mesh. For our final task, we will learn how to create code that runs in parallel on the graphics card without further burdening the CPU or decreasing the frame rate of...