Shell:B Worlds

Community worlds for Shell:B, the local-first AI workspace. Part of the family with Shell-B-Themes, Shell-B-Screensavers and Shell-B-Agents.

A Shell:B world is a guided tour and a set of places on one of the worlds in the Worlds app: Earth, the Moon, Mars, the moons of the giant planets, the dwarf planets. A tour is a list of stops the app flies between while the narration is shown and, if you like, read aloud. A place is a pin with its own card: a summary, facts, sections and links, in the Atlas places layer. An overlay is a GeoJSON file drawn on the map: a route, a boundary, a set of points. Everything is data; a world can't run code.

Install one

Today a world plays through the chat. Print its map block and paste it into any conversation with Atlas or Shell:B:

python3 -I scripts/map_block.py apollo-sites

The block renders as a map card; Open in Worlds flies to the scene, and Play tour starts the fly-through. For a world's places, ask Atlas to add them ("add the places from this world to the map") and it will write them to the cards with annotate_map_feature. Overlays import through Worlds → Bookmarks → Import (GeoJSON, KML or GPX).

One-click install from Settings, the way themes and screensavers work, is planned; the files here already have the shape the app reads, so nothing will need to change.

Catalogue

World	Body	What it is
The Apollo landing sites	Moon	Six landings, 1969 to 1972, plus Surveyor 3 as a place
Every landing on Mars	Mars	Ten landers and rovers from Viking 1 to Zhurong
Ring of Fire	Earth	Nine volcanoes around the Pacific rim; turn on the earthquake layer
The Silk Road	Earth	Xi'an to Constantinople in nine cities, with the road as a GeoJSON overlay

index.json is the machine-readable version of this table.

Make one

Ask Atlas for a tour ("give me a tour of the Jupiter missions") and save the block's tour list into a world.json, or write it by hand. Every world is a folder under worlds/:

worlds/silk-road/
  world.json       the world
  route.geojson    optional overlays, listed in world.json
  preview.jpg      optional, about 640×360, ≤ 400 KB

The format:

{
  "name": "The Silk Road",                   // 1-60 characters
  "blurb": "One or two sentences for the picker (≤ 200 characters)",
  "body": "earth",                           // sol, mercury, venus, earth, moon, mars, vesta, ceres, jupiter, io, europa,
                                             // ganymede, callisto, saturn, enceladus, titan, …, uranus, neptune, pluto, …
  "scene": {                                 // optional: where the world opens
    "lat": 38, "lon": 72, "zoom": 3.1, "pitch": 0, "bearing": 0,
    "layers": {"relief": true, "quakes": true},   // layer ids: flights, satellites, quakes, daynight, imagery, radar,
                                             // aurora, wind, landmarks, traverses, wonders, shipwrecks, caves, neolithic,
                                             // launchsites, webcams, places, relief, terrain3d, buildings, iceage,
                                             // atmosphere, plumes, dust, grid, stars
    "time": "1969-07-20T20:17:00Z",          // optional: sets the map clock
    "years_ago": 20000                       // optional: the Ice Age coast
  },
  "tour": [                                  // up to 60 stops
    {"title": "Xi'an", "text": "20 to 1200 characters, read aloud", "lat": 34.34, "lon": 108.94,
     "zoom": 9, "pitch": 45, "bearing": 280, "seconds": 14}
  ],
  "places": [                                // up to 200 pins with cards
    {"name": "Surveyor 3", "lat": -2.99, "lon": -23.34, "kind": "mission",   // place, mission, crater, volcano, mountain,
     "summary": "…", "facts": ["…"],          // canyon, plain, sea, site, city, wreck, wonder, event, route
     "sections": [{"title": "…", "text": "…"}], "links": [{"title": "…", "url": "https://…"}]}
  ],
  "overlays": ["route.geojson"],             // GeoJSON files in the folder, ≤ 2 MB each
  "author": "Your name",
  "license": "CC-BY-4.0",                    // an SPDX id; CC-BY-4.0 suits text you wrote, CC0-1.0 if you don't care
  "version": "1.0",
  "tags": ["earth", "history"]
}

Longitudes are east-positive, from -180 to 180 (the app also accepts 0 to 360 for the planetary bodies).

A good tour reads like a documentary, not an encyclopaedia: each stop says what happened here and why it matters, in two to four sentences that sound right read aloud. Check every coordinate on the map before you commit; the validator can tell a number is in range, not that it is the right crater.

Then check it:

python3 -I scripts/validate.py

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the pull request checklist.

Other collections

Shell:B installs from the whole family: Shell-B-Themes, Shell-B-Screensavers and Shell-B-Agents work the same way, with a validator, CI and a one-screen checklist each. Found a bug in the app itself? That goes to Shell-B issues; questions and show-and-tell to Discussions.

License

The scripts and this repository are MIT. Each world names its own license in world.json; the ones here are CC-BY-4.0.