- My laptop has insufficient hardware for me to run Rhino, so I would like to pay someone to print the test project for me, which I will upgrade over time.
- 3D Print a sphere, 8” diameter, with the legends that are in the two attached .jpegs printed on the front and back of the sphere, respectively.
- Attach a thin magnet to the north pole such that it sticks out ~2 cm.
- Print a curved line, on the sphere, under the magnet (the magnet’s “shadow”).
You could do this yourself without 3d printing. Michael’s or art supply stores have wooden spheres and spheres from other materials. Develop or unroll your text and turn it into a sticker and apply that to the sphere. You could use inkscape or other free software to print the stickers.
You could do a test mock up using a Styrofoam sphere then you could insert your tangent vector or something resembling it to get an idea. Just print out your text, gore it and paste it using rubber cement or glue onto the sphere. It won’t look great but you might get and idea of how it works.
For a more robust solution paint your sphere, and stencil the text.
You could also substitute a string for the tangent vector and using a light you can cast a shadow to get your geodesic line on the sphere. You could put a small water level on the string to make sure its horizontal. With the string you could also use it to show directly on the sphere how a geodesic line is shorter than a Euclidian line.
RM