[моё] Name on the map or adapting a NASA service
The other day I saw how the NASA service went viral in many communities, where you can type in any word and it will pick it out of objects on the map. In other words, it looks for rivers, mountains, houses that resemble letters and simply makes a word out of them; you can play with it using the link at the end of the post.
The service is interesting, and there’s no AI generation involved—basically, it’s just a set of preselected images. But there’s a downside: you can’t use anything except Latin letters. For a Russian speaker, even typing your own name is quite difficult. So after some thought, I decided that it needed localization.
The tool is fairly simple to implement: it’s a list containing images, coordinates (from which it generates a map link), and a description of the place where it was made. The images were picked pretty quickly, uploaded, and we played around with it—and it turned out to be really cool and fun. So I’m presenting to you a localized version that supports all Russian characters.
At the same time, we decided to improve the original service:
- Spaces are supported here, which makes it possible to form a phrase. We didn’t really impose any size limit, but the longer it is, the smaller the images become, so that’s up to the user.
- We also gave users the ability to upload their own symbol; after moderation, it will become available to everyone. This will increase the visual variety of phrases
I invite everyone to play and add their own symbols (Localization)
Original NASA service (Latin letters only)
