Living overseas, it’s nice to have a sense of where your home country is relative to your current location.

Presenting: 🌍 Dig Through! 🪏

Uses WebXR + your geolocation to display a virtual hole dug into the earth, to show what’s on the other side.

You can try it too 👇

It’s browser based, you can try it on your phone:

https://tim-fan.github.io/dig-through

You’ll need to grant location permissions for it to work.

Details

This was a concept I tried a couple years ago but didn’t complete. Now I’ve tried again with the power of AI. This was mostly coded on my phone with claude while I was on the train. Still needs clean up but it mostly works to show the concept.

Code is here:

https://github.com/tim-fan/dig-through/tree/main

ToDo items

• Confirm accuracy - the direction to New Zealand is roughly as I expect, but should be more methodically tested
• Nicer effects, show a little spade digging the hole, sound effects, better textures
• Select satellite or map view
• User flow improvements - graceful error handling, graceful handling of location permission denial, etc
• Should earth model be made much larger? Or scale is negligible?

Obligatory mention to Google’s Floom experiment - that is also a webxr app for seeing through the earth, I just changed the projection approach so you can see full countries and interact by walking around the portal.