A while ago I made a 3D world news map using Flash. You can do a lot of things with Flash, but the calculations needed for 3D are really too processor-intensive. I’ve been looking at doing a similar sort of thing but in Java, specifically, using the Processing environment. Here’s a screenshot of work in progress.

I put this widget together for the Backstage Widget Competition. It’s a Flash-based widget that shows the latest world headlines on a revolving 3D map. For each item in the XML feed, it shows the headline, the short summary and an indicator showing where in the world the item originated. The headlines are refreshed every 15 minutes.

Mouseover the map to pause and click to view the current story.