Mapping the Internet

I just discovered "The Internet Mapping Project" on Flickr today. One is prompted to draw a map of the internet, as they see it, and indicate their "home." Some of the maps are extremely similar to a sketch that I have created and my overall vision for the 3D Internet Visualization project. To quote Kevin Kelly, the site's creator:


"The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It's expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders. And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map 
in our head."


Here is my concept sketch of the Internet:

Each sphere represents a different website. The radius and position of each sphere could be determined by data such as global internet rank, pageviews and Google PageRank. The surface of each sphere in this sketch is a stylized representation of the website itself, but in practice could be either a screenshot of the website in question, a favicon (that little 16x16 pixel icon to the left of the URL) or a color that changes depending on traffic data. All of these variables and attributes are still somewhat up in the air and will depend on what looks best after experimentation.


From doing research on the internet and talking with a fellow software developer, I have begun to explore creating the 3DIV project in Java3D. Java seems relatively well suited to a beginning programmer like me and has the flexibility of easily being deployed as a standalone software or embedded in a web page.


Stay tuned for more developments and please send me any suggestions/comments. 

Imagining the Internet

What do you see when you try to imagine the internet? A spider web of countless web pages connected by a practically infinite series of strands? A galaxy, not unlike our own, with a central nucleus and swirling mass of stars and planets? A series of tubes? Maybe you'd prefer to imagine it as a series of computers, servers, wires and undersea cables that span the globe, or perhaps the internet exists in the 1s and 0s themselves, traveling to and fro at blinding speed.

It can be difficult to even visualize the internet as a whole due to its massive size and intangible nature and due to how closely it has been woven into the fabric of our daily lives. What was once transported over a series of wires now travels invisibly, magically through the air, connecting us instantly, everywhere. One cannot SEE the internet but it's all around us and growing larger every day.

As a digital artist, some of my favorite books and movies have involved visual interpretations of computer networks and the data screaming through them. In "The Matrix", humanity is trapped inside a virtual construct of reality which, to an observer, appears as strands of mysterious green characters on a screen. "Hackers" portrays the two-dimensional world of the computer hacker as a fantastical 3D universe filled with swirling numbers, letters, light and color that lives inside a series of giant transparent illuminated server towers called the "Gibson" (shown above). William Gibson, to which this fictional device is named, coined the term "cyberspace" and imagined a "matrix" of data represented by colorful 3D shapes which are hacked into by the main character Case in his first and most critically acclaimed novel, "Neuromancer."

While these visions of data as swirling lights traveling through the ether are entertaining, they lack actual substance and function. How might an actual 3D representation of the internet look and what possible uses could it have? That question is what led me towards starting this project. I intend on creating a virtual representation of the internet which differs from stylized versions in that it is created from actual internet traffic data. Global internet rankings, search analytics, percentage of global internet views and other datasets are available online (Alexa.com, for example). Obtaining the data is the easy part; interpreting, formatting, translating and displaying it in an visually appealing way is much more challenging.

This blog will follow the development of the 3DIV (3 Dimensional Internet Visualization) project, from concept to implementation. I will undoubtedly require assistance at some point due to my modicum of programming skills and the scale which I envision this project has the potential of becoming. Anyone interested in becoming involved can post a comment; anyone I know in person should be able to find my contact information.

- Jack