How to create realistic Earth globe in Flash (AS3, Papervision3D)

Papervision3D is a perfect tool for the purpose. As you will see such a task needs only few lines of code. To make the example a little bit more interesting we will add additional code to control the rotation of the globe by the mouse.

The idea here is to use the Sphere object. Then we will simply apply a MovieMaterial to it. I used a nice image of the Earth, which had to be flat. Leave the 3d transformations for the engine. The result could be seen here. Feel free to download the source files and experiment with them.

The code: