The printed plate
South America lifted out. The frame underneath is the plate.
The World
Seven continents in one ocean
▶ Play it onlineAt this scale one millimetre is about 157 kilometres, which means the Alps are a bump you can feel with a fingertip and the Himalaya are unmistakable in the dark. The ocean is not empty background here — it is the frame the continents sit in, printed as one continuous blue surface, so a child taking Africa out is left holding a continent and looking at the shape of the sea that surrounds it. The snow caps at both poles and along the high ranges are printed white, from real snow-persistence data rather than from a drawing.
What a child works out
- Continents are shapes you can hold, not words on a list.
- The ocean is one connected thing, not the gaps between land.
- Mountains are where they are for a reason — feel the Andes run the whole west edge of South America.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on The World.
The plate
- Pieces
- 7 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 157 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 74.46
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 308 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Africa
- Antarctica
- Asia
- Europe
- North America
- Oceania
- South America
Zoom in, zoom out
A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
Follow the borders — World to continent to country to canton to city district
Follow the borders — World to continent to country to state to township
