Globe, Journey Map, Place Lens

"From the whole traveled world down to a single mountain village — one state, seen at three scales."

A Continuous Zoom

Waystone's geography is not one map screen; it is a continuous hierarchy: Globe to Journey Map to Place Lens. Each level is the same canonical travel state, projected at a different scale. Zooming is not switching apps — it is asking the model to render itself more or less tightly. The three levels answer three different questions: where have I ever been, what did this one trip look like, and what does this one place actually mean to me.

The Three Levels

Globe — the long-term visual memory of all travel. Visited places get planted flags; planned trips get visually distinct provisional flags; wishlist, skipped, favorite, and revisit states stay distinguishable; journey arcs show movement across the world; a time slider can replay how the traveled world accumulated. Selecting a flag opens the journeys, memories, logs, media, and consultation context behind it.
Journey Map — one trip in detail: accommodation bases, transport modes, planned and actual routes, day colors, cancellations, detours, spontaneous discoveries, linked logs and media, with a timeline scrubber to replay the journey by day or event.
Place Lens — the complete travel meaning of one area, like Grindelwald: lodging and transport nodes, railways and cable cars and trails, restaurants and viewpoints, planned versus actual movement, weather and the changes it forced, photos and audio notes and field observations, and the logs and video stories tied to it.

Not a Generic Map Zoom

The key insight is that the Place Lens is not just the Journey Map zoomed in further. A generic map zoom shows you more streets. The Place Lens shows you more meaning — it is the accumulated significance of a place across everything you did, planned, skipped, felt, and filmed there. That is only possible because all three levels read the same rich canonical state instead of a thin tile layer. The globe is not a different product from the lens; they are the same memory, viewed from orbit and from the ground.

Code

One state, three scales·text

GLOBE          every journey, as planted flags + arcs
  |            "where have I ever been?"
  v  zoom in
JOURNEY MAP    one trip: bases, routes, day colors, detours
  |            "what did this trip look like?"
  v  zoom in
PLACE LENS     one area: lodging, trails, weather, media, logs
               "what does Grindelwald mean to me?"

# Zooming is not switching apps.
# It is the same model rendering itself at a tighter scale.
# The lens shows more MEANING, not just more streets.

Exercise

Pick a place you have been to more than once. List everything that place means to you: where you stayed, what you did, what you skipped, the weather, a photo you took, a feeling. Now ask: could any map app you use show you THAT — the accumulated meaning — or only the streets? The gap between 'more detail' and 'more meaning' is exactly what a Place Lens is for.

Hint

Most map apps are tile layers with pins. A Place Lens is a memory layer with geography. If your map can show you the restaurant but not that you and Mom loved it in 2021 and it was closed in 2024, it renders streets, not significance.