Story Globe - Interactive 3D Folk Tale Explorer

I built Story Globe to solve a cultural discovery problem: folk tales and oral traditions from around the world are scattered and hard to access without knowing what to search for. The app presents stories from 14 countries through an interactive Three.js WebGL globe, where country flags are pinned to geographic coordinates and tapping a flag reveals stories and authors from that nation.

Designed the full experience around zero signup friction — Supabase (PostgreSQL) powers the story and author data layer, while localStorage handles progress persistence so users can track explored countries and earned badges without an account. React Query v5 manages server state and caching, keeping the reading experience snappy even on mobile.

The project pushed me to think carefully about mobile-native interaction design: responsive camera logic for the 3D globe, a bottom drawer navigation pattern optimised for one-handed use, and illustrated tale pages that balance visual richness with performance. I also instrumented two custom analytics events (`country_opened`, `story_opened`) via Vercel Analytics to understand how users discover and engage with content across the globe.