this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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This has got to be wrong. A human head, projected like a world map, would show both eyes and both ears, except in the case of showing only one half (like when you only show/photograph the Americas).
This appears to take a picture of the side of the head (i.e. that particular projection, showing less than half of the full globe), then distort it as if it were already a different projection.
Edit: worse than that. The globe onto which the half-head-image is superimposed in the top right is larger than the head. Like if you took a photo of the Americas half of the world from space, pasted that onto a larger beach ball, then stretched the result to demonstrate the projections.
For a better visualization of how a human would look on the mercator projection, look no further than old games' 3D textures, like this one from Half Life: https://www.textures-resource.com/fullview/6384/?source=genre
Taking a second look at that, though - is that really a continuous projection? Or is that storing different parts as different chunks (and maybe projected differently) put together into the one image?
Some parts are continuous projections, like the face and torso, which are "closed" geometric objects. I don't know exactly how the HL human mesh is, whether separated in different chunks or fully joined in a single 3D object, but either would work if the faces are properly pointed to the specific pixel regions
it's definitely just mirroring the side of the head at runtime
Oh wow that website is so nostalgic even without the textures!
Huh, neat!
Possibly. I asked (and no one's answered yet, so I still don't know) if it's still a Mercator projection if you vertically bisect a map of the Earth.
It's still a Mercator projection if you take any part of a map projected thusly. (And there's the "modified universal transverse Mercator" that, I think, is that with some grid offset.)
But, see my edit, this image isn't doing that. It's stretching a "picture of half a face superimposed on a larger half globe," not the half-face as if the head were the globe.
Yes. Why wouldn't it be?
Projections don't have to be limited to the entire earth. You can subset the area represented and still apply a projection. (Though you do have a decision if you're taking an arc-area to "re-align" your projecting shape so that it best fits your area. But that might be more complicated than you're looking for, other projections best suited for your locale would be a better fit)