SuperTunnel Simulator: Dig a Hole Through Earth! 🌎

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As a kid, have you ever wondered about digging a hole through Earth?
Where would you end up? How long would it be?

I created supertunnel.app to try to answer those questions :slight_smile:
Enter your city and simulate a tunnel across the globe!

This project was part of my master’s thesis and was longlisted :medal_sports: in the Information is Beautiful Awards 2022.

The full case study is here:
vsueiro.com/work/supertunnel

As an experiment, I also controlled it “with a physical shovel”, but it was just an internal prototype:

supertunnel-app-shovel
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I would love to hear your feedback and, hopefully, see the project featured on three.js home page :heart:

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Beautiful.

Some time I ago I made antipodes mapping (similar to the one in Wikipedia, see here ). The map was just overlapping two transparent maps, nothing special.

BTW, when I try to find the antipode of the North Pole, it gives … North Pole, 0 km away, instead of the South Pole:

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Thanks so much for the kind words!
I used a lot of those antipodes maps as references :slight_smile:

Also, could you please tell me which Browser and OS you were using when the North Pole bug happened?

I’m on a Mac and every browser that I tested (Chrome, Arc, Safari, and Firefox) works.

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The only thing that I haven’t really added yet is Antarctica, which is where the tunnel should point to, in that case.

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When the origin is set to the North pole:

  • Firefox + Windows 10 → when I move the direction to (0,0) the correct line to the South pole appears with distance 12700 km, but after a few seconds the line disappears and the distance is 0 km
  • Firefox + Windows 7 → the line stays, but when I rotate the Earth for 5-10 seconds, the line disappears and the distance becomes 0 km

In both cases there are no any messages in the console.

With Chromium-bases browsers on both Win10 and Win7 there is no problem with the North pole.
When the origin is not the North pole, there is no problem with Firefox; if the South pole is the origin, there is no problem too.

Other, unrelated observations
  • there are lot of warnings in the console: THREE.DirectGeometry.fromGeometry(): Undefined vertexUv
  • it might be good to allow selection of origin by clicking on the globe
  • on a smartphone I cannot find the entry field for origin address, I can only see the automatic geolocation
  • distance to antipode is always 12700 km, the equatorial radius of bigger than the polar radius, so the distance from Pontianak to Colombia is closer to 12800 than to 12700
  • when origin is one of the poles, the direction grid might be confusing, as there are no N, S, W and E directions
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Wow, thank you so much for the feedback!

Most of the items are things I did not consider (like the N, S, W, E directions when the origin is one of the poles). Took note of everything and will try to implement some of those in an updated version of the website :wink:

Thanks again – I really appreciate it, Pavel!

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also, it just won’t stop spinning. I drag the globe to see new zeland better, then go into square box area, and in a few seconds new zeland is drifting away from the view again. so annoying.