Software

Atlas Omnia

All of history, mapped. Search for anything, drag the timeline, and watch events land on a 3D globe.

A 3D globe centred on the Mediterranean, covered in glowing markers for events from the Roman era — The opening view: the Mediterranean from 27 BCE to 476 CE, from Augustus to the fall of the Western Empire.

How it works

The globe is NASA's WorldWind inside a React app, styled to look like an engraved map.
The events live in Elasticsearch, so one search can filter by words, dates and the part of the world on screen.
The history comes from an LLM crawler. It works through a frontier of topics, generates events for each one, and tries to merge duplicates by comparing time, place and title.

The year zero problem

Search engines are good at dates, but not at dates thousands of years before the common era. Every event is stored as a whole number of days in a "Human Era" calendar instead, which keeps BCE dates positive and makes range searches simple. Changing where that calendar starts means reindexing every event.

The vanishing globe

On displays with fractional scaling, the globe would slowly drift and then disappear. The rendering library never rounded the canvas size, so the size it calculated could never match the real canvas. It resized on every frame, and each resize nudged the camera's field of view until it was invalid. The fix was a small replacement for the library's resize function.