Visualising Earth in PowerBI Custom Visual

Early on in my 3D visualisation experimentation was a desire to recreate the PowerMap experiance.  I eventually managed to find a source of land and country boundaries, which I was able to project into a 3D scene and then plot points based on latitude and longitude.

After many hours searching, experimenting and crying, I found a formula for projecting the points onto a sphere so I could create the globe.

But my map data was not perfect, and I wantted a more realistic globe image.  So I downloaded some image data from NASA at https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/.  There Blue Marble collection of images was perfect for my needs.

Daytime Globe View

Night Map View

Using my limited experiance and skills of 3D and PowerBI visual development, I was able to create a PowerBI Cutom Visual with a much more realisitic look and feel.  Points can be plotted by latitude and longitude, or a country can be highlighted by name, ISO2 or ISO3.

My projection code (which is the key to making this work..) is as follows:

    private projectAsMap(long: number, lat: number, r: number): THREE.Vector3 {         let z = long / 180.0;         let y = lat / 180.0;         return new THREE.Vector3(r, -y, -z);     }     private projectAsGlobe(long: number, lat: number, r: number): THREE.Vector3 {         let s = -long * (Math.PI / 180);         let t = (lat + 90) * (Math.PI / 180);         let x = r * Math.cos(s) * Math.sin(t);         let z = r * Math.sin(s) * Math.sin(t);         let y = r * Math.cos(t);         return new THREE.Vector3(x, y, z);     }