April 22, 2026 · 2 min read · The Atlas team
The Globe Was Always the Canvas
The idea for Atlas started in 2014, in an MIT Media Lab classroom, a decade before it became a product.
Atlas did not start in 2025. It started in 2014, in a classroom at the MIT Media Lab.
The idea crystallized around Earth Day that year, which feels fitting in hindsight: the pitch was not for another app with a map bolted on as an afterthought. It was a new way to tell a story — not on a flat rectangle, but wrapped around a globe. The world itself would be the canvas, not a 2D div pretending to be one.
A prototype got built. Two names were in the running for it — Sfeer and Journey — before the whole thing got a much bigger test than a classroom demo.
Quito
That semester, the class took a trip to Quito, Ecuador, to share projects with local students. The globe pitch landed harder than expected — the kind of reaction that makes you believe, for a minute, that you have found something real. A room of strangers leaning in to watch a story move around a spinning Earth.
Then the ground moved
That same year, Google shut down the Google Earth API the prototype was built on. There was no graceful migration — the 3D globe the whole idea depended on was just gone. Without it, the momentum to keep building drained out fast. The idea did not die. It just went quiet, filed under "someday," for over a decade.
Spring 2025
Eleven years later, Google relaunched 3D world rendering inside the Google Maps JavaScript API. Same dream, finally a foundation solid enough to build on. The globe-as-canvas idea from a Media Lab classroom in 2014 had somewhere to live.
It was time to build.
That is the seed Atlas grew from. Read about what we are building now.