About City In A Snowglobe

What it is, how it is built, and who made it

City In A Snowglobe is a weather app that answers with a place rather than a number. Type a city and it builds that city inside a snow globe, in that city's weather, at that city's hour, in that city's season — and then lets you pick the globe up and put it on your own table.

Why build the weather instead of listing it

A forecast tells you it is 6°C and overcast with a twelve mile an hour wind from the south-west. That is accurate and it is hard to picture. A globe showing a grey afternoon over a city you know, with the clouds all running one way and the lamps already on, tells you the same thing in a form you can read at a glance.

So the readings are still there — temperature, feels-like, humidity, pressure, visibility, wind, sunrise, sunset, a six-day outlook and the next forty-eight hours — in a panel you can pull out. But the first answer is the picture.

How it is put together

• The scene is three.js through React Three Fiber, drawn with WebGL. Everything in the city is modelled rather than imported: the buildings, the park, the fountain, the weather and the globe itself.
• The weather is OpenWeather, fetched through this site's own endpoint so the key is never shipped to the browser, and cached for fifteen minutes.
• The sun and the moon are placed with the standard solar and lunar position formulas from the city's latitude, longitude and local time, rather than being parked somewhere convenient.
• Augmented reality is WebXR where the device has it, with a camera fallback and Quick Look for iOS.
• The Android app is the same site wrapped with Capacitor.

Things worth knowing

• No account, ever. There is nothing to sign in to and nothing is collected about you. The privacy policy is short and specific.
• Your location is never requested. Weather is looked up by the city name you type.
• The same city always builds the same city. The skyline is generated from the name, so it does not shuffle between visits.
• It works offline, briefly. A cached reading up to a day old is shown if the network is gone, rather than an error.

Reading further

• How the globe reads the weather — which field of the observation drives which part of the scene.
• Seasons in the park — how the season is chosen, and what each one changes.
• Standing inside the globe — what your device can do, and how to use it.

Credits

• Weather data by OpenWeather.
• Condition icons from the Meteocons set.
• Built with three.js, React Three Fiber and Capacitor; hosted on Vercel.

Contact

Corrections, bug reports and requests: literaryquery23@gmail.com