Maybe I'm behind the times, but I just happened to come across a neat little web app that lets you display world maps in various projections and gives you a 3D globe view and such. Check it out here. I found it on an older blog post here.

It's not super powerful, but really neat! There is some distortion going from a flat image to globe and such, but that is to be expected I guess. There are a few options to tweak and play around with and also an option to project your map in different projections. You can add a background image and even height maps if you have them.

Here's a quick image I just threw together using a world map I've been working on and a random image of space I grabbed from google.

This is no work of art put here for criticism, this is just a 2 second job of an example for the sake of showing what this web app can do.

Click image for larger version.  Name: globe_test.png  Views: 76  Size: 1.92 MB  ID: 72776

I just thought I'd share. If this app is old news, my bad.

Enjoy!