Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.
Maybe I'm overlooking, but would love if this had an accurate political globe (e.g., countries and capitals) for my young kids.
"or with your own pinned places via the custom globe builder."
Right there at the top of the page with a link even: https://foldingglobes.com/
In fact, it looks like the default landing page for the site. TFA looks to be a quick link to the free options
I hear you, but I'm suggesting a preconfigured one like the others that are linked here.
I do find it interesting that while modern map apps do a great job of replacing road atlases, and we can get satellite and photogrammetry overlays that give us immense insight into how maps relate to the context on the ground, and we do have pretty good topographic mapping apps (though sadly not built in to the big map apps like Google or Apple), but one kind of map that we used to get in paper atlases but can’t explore so easily online are political maps. Google Maps is also not great as a physical map in that it is bad at labelling and naming geographic features - Apple Maps does a better job at this. But neither offers a good way to hide all the roads and just look at borders.
Borders are a nightmare because many countries have contested areas and ask everyone inside the country to use the official one, specialy at schools.
Too late to edit: As a sibling comment says, in the top of the site they offer an option to make a version with only the borders. I don't see an option to combine satellite photos and borders anyway.
The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.