

Show HN: World of X – An Interactive Exploration of the World of Marvel's X-Men - kyleconrad
http://world-of-x.com/

======
kyleconrad
Cross-posted this to Designer News, but just wanted to share it here as well
as I just finished building and deploying this morning. Ever since Marvel
announced their API, I've been looking to find something to build using it. A
friend of mine is big on MeteorJS, so I decided to combine the two - using
Meteor, the Marvel API, and the Google Maps API, I put together this
interactive map that lets you explore the world of the X-Men based around key
locations in their history and the stories based there.

~~~
daveytea
Great work! Please also create this for alternate timelines, i.e. Age of
Apocalypse :D

~~~
kyleconrad
Ohhhh I love this idea. Days of Future Past, Age of Apocalypse... hmmm. Might
have to look into those events to check out some locations.

------
mikeleeorg
Great work! I saw your map on The Next Web [1], so it looks like you're
already getting some good press.

My first thought was this map reminded me of Cerebro, so I expected to be able
to find individual characters too. That could be a nice next step.

And after that, maybe some map overlays to show the geographic distribution
and progression of various Marvel Universe events.

Then ?

And finally, profit!

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/24/interactive-map-
x-m...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/09/24/interactive-map-x-men-
universe-new-favorite-thing/)

~~~
kyleconrad
Oh man, thanks for the link! Super excited about that.

I like the idea of individual characters, I could see having locations with
different colored markers for their origins/birthplace. That wouldn't be super
super difficult to build out, either, as there's a lot of information there to
pull from.

Someone else in another comment suggested doing locations based on
events/alternate timelines, which sounds pretty similar to this idea, and also
could be very cool. Just a matter of doing research - the Marvel API is great
for single data points (i.e. character, series, single comic), but gets super
overwhelming (and a little useless for this kind of thing) when you search for
an event or the like. But yeah, definitely doable as a Phase II kind of thing.

------
Domenic_S
Pretty cool.

Zoom animation was choppy, quad core FF/mac.

`esc` key should zoom back out imo.

~~~
kyleconrad
Yeah, I actually just changed it to a simple zoom with no pan about an hour
ago. I was using an interval to adjust the zoom function with the Google Maps
API, but everyone said it seemed super choppy. Unfortunate, because I was
hoping that would be a cool effect, but don't want to let something like that
get in the way of a good user experience. So now just panning to the location
at your current zoom level when you click a marker, hopefully that's smoother!

------
psweber
Pretty cool. Some kind of clustering solution for points that are near each
other would be nice.

~~~
kyleconrad
Agreed entirely - there's a set of Google Maps utility tools that Google put
out that tie into the API and I'm actually using the markers with labels one
to show the markers as it is now. They also have a library that can cluster
markers. From my initial research, those two can't exactly work alongside each
other (due to conflicts), but I'll certainly look into possibilities of
combining them for a better experience.

------
timthimmaiah
Just noticed that this URL will get flagged/blocked by network admin content
filters ;)

~~~
kyleconrad
Haha I know, I know - I tried to get a few different domain names before
settling on this one. Fingers crossed that there's enough context around the
link (and whatever metadata those filters need) to make sure it doesn't get
ignored/blocked.

