How the WCA Globe works
/wca/globe is an interactive 3D globe of WCA competitions, built on MapLibre GL JS with vector tiles. A single top search box finds competitions, cubers, cities and places; views include upcoming-comp clusters, animated cuber career trajectories, and world-records-by-country.
Three modes
The top selector toggles Upcoming and WR; the cuber trail is entered by searching for a person:
- Upcoming — shows clustered upcoming WCA competitions worldwide; zoom in to expand clusters and click for date / location / events. Toggle "Include past" to overlay historical comps with a year-month range filter; the top-right switches density styles: log-scale / heatmap / country choropleth.
- WR — a country choropleth of how many world records each country holds; drag the timeline to inspect the record map for a given year.
- Trail — search a cuber name or WCA-ID in the top search box and select it to animate their career competition locations as a time-ordered arc sequence. Play / pause / scrub, change speed, and export as video.
Controls
1
Basic navigation
Left-drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan. Touch devices support single-finger rotate and pinch-to-zoom.
2
Map styles
The layers button in the top right switches between vector map, satellite imagery, and dark-mode map. Dark mode follows the site theme automatically.
3
Drawing tools
The toolbar at the bottom offers measure / path / polygon drawing modes. Use them to measure great-circle distances between comps or to mark regions of interest.
4
Cuber trail & export
Search a cuber name or WCA-ID in the top search box and select it to enter trail mode; click Play and arcs draw chronologically. The timeline is scrub-able, speed is 0.5× / 1× / 2×, and you can export a 60 fps mp4 (with cuber / comp captions + logo).
Data and technology
The globe uses MapLibre GL JS (open-source WebGL), with tiles from the site or MapTiler. WCA competition coordinates come from the weekly dump. Density calculations run in the client in real-time (Canvas + vt-pbf vector tile encoding). Satellite mode requires network; vector tiles render entirely in the browser and work offline.
See also
- Competitions — competition calendar + round-by-round results.
- MapLibre GL JS — the WebGL rendering engine, Apache 2.0 open source.