What it is
A travel map covered in darkness that clears as you actually go places. It's a vanity map.
Fog of Discovery
A travel map prototype that clears the fog over places you've actually been.
The short version
What I had to steer
This is the one where I didn't steer enough. The prompt was broad and I said yes to everything: maps, globes, photo metadata, imports. It never found a lane.
What I wired together
A Replit React prototype exploring map UI, travel data modelling and the location-history integrations a real version would need.
Where I pushed it
It got further into the problem than the product. A real version needs location data from photo libraries or airline apps, and that's a privacy and integration problem more than a UI one.
The build log
A travel vanity map
It started from a simple feeling: I’ve seen relatively little of the world and I’d like to see more. That turned into a question about motivation. If your travel history were a world map covered in darkness, revealed as you actually went places, would exploring feel more real, more like a game? Would it get you to go somewhere?
I could also see pride and storytelling in it: a public map on your site that shows how much of the world you’ve seen, without a long conversation.
Where it went wrong
It was probably the most technically ambitious thing I tried, and that was the problem. The prompt was broad and there were too many possible directions from the start: maps, globes, location data, user-entered reveals, photo metadata, satellite layers, travel-history imports and privacy-heavy integrations. I didn’t narrow any of that down before I started, so the prototype never found a clean lane. It’s the weakest build of the set.
It was still useful. Filling in your history by hand is unrealistic for most people, so a real version would need location traces from Apple Photos, Google Photos or airline apps. That brings privacy questions and more integration work than an early prototype should take on.
What I think now
It soured me on the app idea I started with. I still like the visual, but I don’t think it has broad appeal as an app. The more interesting version is smaller and stranger: a pannable globe on a personal website that says “this is Adam’s world discovery map”. It’s slightly vain and slightly pointless, and maybe memorable for exactly that reason.