For ease of finding, I have compiled all of Jasper's and I's work into one page, which will be updated whenever new things are developed.
development.html
For the next semester, I will continue along the visual course of the project. The UI will probably go through several more refinements in style and organization, and other visuals such as websites and logos will fall under my realm as well.
But first and foremost, I think, will be coming up with a name for our game/simulation/explorer, and then perhaps basing a style off of that. I've already asked several people for ideas and they're all pretty stumped... naming is harder than I thought. Hopefully, though, I can have the new name and theme done by the beginning of next semester.
So of course, any ideas for a name are certainly welcome.
12.17.2007
Maunderings: End of Semester
Well, it's been a crazy semester, that's for sure. Having a collaborator in another class on a different schedule was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
At first is was all okay, he was writing papers, and by helping him get his ideas onto paper it was helping me formulate the ideas in my head. We came up with the concept, the nitty-gritty bits, and life was good, right? I got through my assignments with only a few hitches, he was getting his papers done, and things were progressing like normal.
And then reality kicked in.
Our original IP idea got shot down, because it didn't tie the game and the internet content together closely enough. Okay, time to fall back on another idea garnered from a session with an expert - tying a galaxy together with links. The planet content stayed about the same. But how do we determine what is what?
At first celestial objects were going to be stacked based on the amount of links. Then it was changed to organize it based on domain. But then how does that work? Well, let's make the planets have everything determined by their content. Easy enough. Except that in order to do most of the stuff we'd want to put into the program we'd have to pretty much write a whole new browser, perhaps.
And then there was the headache of the division of the project - what's Jasper's role and what was mine? When it was all concept, then it was both of us, but when project development kicked in then it got a bit blurry. Jasper's original intent was to have me doing interface design, yet I seemed to have more and more programming pushed on me. Do I stick to just the visuals and ignore these demands at the risk of my grade, or do I try to stumble through a programming language I don't know at all, and have no idea where to start from, and have to rely heavily on outside help?
Meanwhile, our project is getting great reviews from other people, and getting a fair amount of mention. People don't know exactly what our idea is, but they do like what they do know.
So in the end, after one last nerve-wracking presentation, I find out people don't really know at all what we want to do with this project. Some think it should be as open as possible, with lots of markers to see what other people have done, and others want to go against the whole exploration thing and make it into another version of a social networking site, where everyone can accumulate in popular areas and ignore the rest. As much as I would like to go against that as much as possible, is it really worth fighting the norm? Maybe we should put some sort of blogging function into the site so people can endlessly browse heavily trafficked areas and ignore the outer reaches where we're trying to encourage them to explore. I guess the whole "mapping the internet" pales in interest to a sort of storytelling universe, where things happen out of your control, but you can make up stories to justify it to your own liking.
Well, it's all things we'll have to consider over break, and decide whether or not it could be implemented.
At first is was all okay, he was writing papers, and by helping him get his ideas onto paper it was helping me formulate the ideas in my head. We came up with the concept, the nitty-gritty bits, and life was good, right? I got through my assignments with only a few hitches, he was getting his papers done, and things were progressing like normal.
And then reality kicked in.
Our original IP idea got shot down, because it didn't tie the game and the internet content together closely enough. Okay, time to fall back on another idea garnered from a session with an expert - tying a galaxy together with links. The planet content stayed about the same. But how do we determine what is what?
At first celestial objects were going to be stacked based on the amount of links. Then it was changed to organize it based on domain. But then how does that work? Well, let's make the planets have everything determined by their content. Easy enough. Except that in order to do most of the stuff we'd want to put into the program we'd have to pretty much write a whole new browser, perhaps.
And then there was the headache of the division of the project - what's Jasper's role and what was mine? When it was all concept, then it was both of us, but when project development kicked in then it got a bit blurry. Jasper's original intent was to have me doing interface design, yet I seemed to have more and more programming pushed on me. Do I stick to just the visuals and ignore these demands at the risk of my grade, or do I try to stumble through a programming language I don't know at all, and have no idea where to start from, and have to rely heavily on outside help?
Meanwhile, our project is getting great reviews from other people, and getting a fair amount of mention. People don't know exactly what our idea is, but they do like what they do know.
So in the end, after one last nerve-wracking presentation, I find out people don't really know at all what we want to do with this project. Some think it should be as open as possible, with lots of markers to see what other people have done, and others want to go against the whole exploration thing and make it into another version of a social networking site, where everyone can accumulate in popular areas and ignore the rest. As much as I would like to go against that as much as possible, is it really worth fighting the norm? Maybe we should put some sort of blogging function into the site so people can endlessly browse heavily trafficked areas and ignore the outer reaches where we're trying to encourage them to explore. I guess the whole "mapping the internet" pales in interest to a sort of storytelling universe, where things happen out of your control, but you can make up stories to justify it to your own liking.
Well, it's all things we'll have to consider over break, and decide whether or not it could be implemented.
Links for Me: Copernica
Stellar Cartography
This page links to a fair amount of stuff that is rather relevant to my project, so I will list the ideas I get from each project.
CyberAtlas
electric sky: I kind of like the idea of having some way for the user to view each page as they go to the representation of it. Firefox has an add-on that saves a page as an image... perhaps that image can be incorporated somehow.
intelligent life: Searching by category is a bit more complicated than what we would like to go into, but perhaps the interconnectivity of .coms, .orgs, and .nets can be represented in this manner.
digital techtonics: Making categories into different dimensions or compass points is an interesting idea, although I am at a loss to think of how this could apply to our category-less project.
Works of Martin Wattenberg
Even though our idea of determining land mass of a planet via white space vs. content has been mostly discarded as being too difficult, it is perhaps possible on a smaller scale. I've seen neural networks mentioned here and there in some of these projects, and a collaborator actually told me that if we saved images of web pages and analyzed them as images, it would be possible to group pages together based on similarity. Web pages that have a mostly green hue could be grouped together, web pages that have similar amounts of images can group together, and etc. However nice of a concept it is, though, it is way out of the scale of our abilities.
This page links to a fair amount of stuff that is rather relevant to my project, so I will list the ideas I get from each project.
CyberAtlas
electric sky: I kind of like the idea of having some way for the user to view each page as they go to the representation of it. Firefox has an add-on that saves a page as an image... perhaps that image can be incorporated somehow.
intelligent life: Searching by category is a bit more complicated than what we would like to go into, but perhaps the interconnectivity of .coms, .orgs, and .nets can be represented in this manner.
digital techtonics: Making categories into different dimensions or compass points is an interesting idea, although I am at a loss to think of how this could apply to our category-less project.
Works of Martin Wattenberg
Even though our idea of determining land mass of a planet via white space vs. content has been mostly discarded as being too difficult, it is perhaps possible on a smaller scale. I've seen neural networks mentioned here and there in some of these projects, and a collaborator actually told me that if we saved images of web pages and analyzed them as images, it would be possible to group pages together based on similarity. Web pages that have a mostly green hue could be grouped together, web pages that have similar amounts of images can group together, and etc. However nice of a concept it is, though, it is way out of the scale of our abilities.
Links For Me: 1:1 (2)
1:1 (2)
This project hearkens back to our original idea, or mapping the internet galaxy based on IP address and translating them based on the pages they contain. However, the idea was discarded for several reasons.
1. Content. While some web pages, like Slashdot, can claim an entire IP address to themselves, maybe even two IPs, other web pages, and especially web spaces like MySpace or Blogger would have thousands of web pages to a few IP addresses. Going by domain name gives the system a more accurate balance of content, and a more logical organization.
2. Feasibility. When inputting an IP address into a system, you will more than likely get a page. However, the page may not be representative of everything that is at that one IP address. In order to find out every page that could be found at one IP, you would have to scan every page and read the IP that is attached to it, and build a database off of that. Not only would that be unrealistic, given the resources two New Media students have available to them, but when you're already building a web crawler to figure out IP addresses, why not use the web crawler data?
3. Representation. IP addresses relate to each other in the fact that they consist of numbers - logically, there is a number before and after each number. The contents of two IP addresses could have nothing in common with each other, and an IP-based project would show a relationship between the two just because they happened to be numerically next to each other. However, web pages tend to link to content that relates to their own - for example, graphic designers will link to other designers, and designing resources.
Ultimately, we went with the link-based model for organizing the galaxy, just because it represented the internet better.
This project hearkens back to our original idea, or mapping the internet galaxy based on IP address and translating them based on the pages they contain. However, the idea was discarded for several reasons.
1. Content. While some web pages, like Slashdot, can claim an entire IP address to themselves, maybe even two IPs, other web pages, and especially web spaces like MySpace or Blogger would have thousands of web pages to a few IP addresses. Going by domain name gives the system a more accurate balance of content, and a more logical organization.
2. Feasibility. When inputting an IP address into a system, you will more than likely get a page. However, the page may not be representative of everything that is at that one IP address. In order to find out every page that could be found at one IP, you would have to scan every page and read the IP that is attached to it, and build a database off of that. Not only would that be unrealistic, given the resources two New Media students have available to them, but when you're already building a web crawler to figure out IP addresses, why not use the web crawler data?
3. Representation. IP addresses relate to each other in the fact that they consist of numbers - logically, there is a number before and after each number. The contents of two IP addresses could have nothing in common with each other, and an IP-based project would show a relationship between the two just because they happened to be numerically next to each other. However, web pages tend to link to content that relates to their own - for example, graphic designers will link to other designers, and designing resources.
Ultimately, we went with the link-based model for organizing the galaxy, just because it represented the internet better.
Links for Me: visualcomplexity.com
Visual Complexity
This web page shows a bunch of "maps" (I use this term lightly) that describe everything from incredibly detailed clusters to random dots and lines people felt like drawing.
A lot of these projects mirror pretty closely what Jasper and I are trying to do with web pages, which is arrange them closer together or further apart based on how much they link together... these projects just do it much better visually. However, these projects do come up with some good ways to make our project work more smoothly.
The Map of Science leads to a paper which suggests color-coding and short-hand, which could make processing the entire galaxy of web pages a lot quicker. Anymails follows a lot of the classification structure that we have been considering in our project, by classifying e-mails much like we would classify web pages. This also opens up the possibility of using different types or appearances of stars to represent different types of web pages. And many other projects are worth looking at, perhaps not for concept, but for visual ideas - sort of like looking at other people's web pages to get visual ideas for your own.
This web page shows a bunch of "maps" (I use this term lightly) that describe everything from incredibly detailed clusters to random dots and lines people felt like drawing.
A lot of these projects mirror pretty closely what Jasper and I are trying to do with web pages, which is arrange them closer together or further apart based on how much they link together... these projects just do it much better visually. However, these projects do come up with some good ways to make our project work more smoothly.
The Map of Science leads to a paper which suggests color-coding and short-hand, which could make processing the entire galaxy of web pages a lot quicker. Anymails follows a lot of the classification structure that we have been considering in our project, by classifying e-mails much like we would classify web pages. This also opens up the possibility of using different types or appearances of stars to represent different types of web pages. And many other projects are worth looking at, perhaps not for concept, but for visual ideas - sort of like looking at other people's web pages to get visual ideas for your own.
12.16.2007
Links for Me: Carnivore/Fuel and Guernica Clients
CarnivorePE
Carnivore is a visually based packet-sniffer. It takes all the information that your computer sends and receives and interprets it into animations or just plain data. It seems to be just limited to what your computer is connecting to - other computers, servers, and modems, which I assume is an more general way of saying "the internet." It animates every connection with a line and a pulse in graphics to show you when the connection is occurring.
Visually, the program is quite interesting. I like the idea of showing connections when they happen, and where they go, and I think it would make for a great capstone if we could incorporate something like that into our project. Unfortunately, all that data that would tell us when connections are occurring and where is just not available, especially for the whole internet. The amount of server permissions and company permissions we'd have to get would be beyond comprehension. But, the pulsing graphics and lines forming is still a good concept to use in our project, it just would not have the meaning that it would in Carnivore.
However, if we wanted to scale our project down to fit servers and connections just within the University, then it might be possible to get data like that, and perhaps build a new sort of interface for network diagnostics. However, that would be severely deviating from our original idea, and it's a bit late in the semester to do that.
Since the next couple of links are just an add-ons to Carnivore, I'll include them in this post.
Fuel
This is the Carnivore concept, except with stars that grow and collapse instead of pulsing circles. The only way I could think of this animation concept applying to our project would be if we had the user go to a solar system, and the solar system would be constantly updating - that is, the program would be constantly scanning the web pages in the domain, looking for the minute changes and displaying them accordingly.
If we would want something like that to work, however, we'd have to put the burden of the webpage scanning on the user side rather than the server, which I don't think would be a very popular idea.
Guernica
Another client which views your traffic and connections as a sort of post-apocalyptic world where planes fly around crazily and buildings are formed and destroyed. It might be fun to consider doing the art style of this project into a particular genre, like cyberpunk or steampunk... definitely something to consider.
Carnivore is a visually based packet-sniffer. It takes all the information that your computer sends and receives and interprets it into animations or just plain data. It seems to be just limited to what your computer is connecting to - other computers, servers, and modems, which I assume is an more general way of saying "the internet." It animates every connection with a line and a pulse in graphics to show you when the connection is occurring.
Visually, the program is quite interesting. I like the idea of showing connections when they happen, and where they go, and I think it would make for a great capstone if we could incorporate something like that into our project. Unfortunately, all that data that would tell us when connections are occurring and where is just not available, especially for the whole internet. The amount of server permissions and company permissions we'd have to get would be beyond comprehension. But, the pulsing graphics and lines forming is still a good concept to use in our project, it just would not have the meaning that it would in Carnivore.
However, if we wanted to scale our project down to fit servers and connections just within the University, then it might be possible to get data like that, and perhaps build a new sort of interface for network diagnostics. However, that would be severely deviating from our original idea, and it's a bit late in the semester to do that.
Since the next couple of links are just an add-ons to Carnivore, I'll include them in this post.
Fuel
This is the Carnivore concept, except with stars that grow and collapse instead of pulsing circles. The only way I could think of this animation concept applying to our project would be if we had the user go to a solar system, and the solar system would be constantly updating - that is, the program would be constantly scanning the web pages in the domain, looking for the minute changes and displaying them accordingly.
If we would want something like that to work, however, we'd have to put the burden of the webpage scanning on the user side rather than the server, which I don't think would be a very popular idea.
Guernica
Another client which views your traffic and connections as a sort of post-apocalyptic world where planes fly around crazily and buildings are formed and destroyed. It might be fun to consider doing the art style of this project into a particular genre, like cyberpunk or steampunk... definitely something to consider.
Links For Me: Rivalry (Economics)
Rivalry (Economics)
A brief Wikipedia article describing a type of economic concept. Rivalrous goods are goods that cannot be consumed by more than one user at a time, but can be reused. I suppose this is supposed to fit with our concept of someone "owning" a planet in the game, by laying claim to it and controlling all it's resources, but also having the capability to be taken over by someone else.
It also goes into the opposite of rival goods, which is non-rival... something that can be enjoyed by many people at the same time. The idea that was brought up in presentations of planets forming get-together chat rooms probably fits with this concept, but I think kind of goes against the idea of exploration and finding those out-of-the-way places that Jasper and I are trying to bring across. Sites like Facebook and MySpace encourage you to go where all your friends are - when have you ever seen these sites encourage you to find people that hardly relate to you at all and figure them out?
I think social networking is great and all, but it doesn't really require you to step very far from your comfort zone, and it sorts of builds the expectation that every site should follow the same rules. Hopefully we can break out of this mentality of clustering together and encourage people to spread out a lot more.
A brief Wikipedia article describing a type of economic concept. Rivalrous goods are goods that cannot be consumed by more than one user at a time, but can be reused. I suppose this is supposed to fit with our concept of someone "owning" a planet in the game, by laying claim to it and controlling all it's resources, but also having the capability to be taken over by someone else.
It also goes into the opposite of rival goods, which is non-rival... something that can be enjoyed by many people at the same time. The idea that was brought up in presentations of planets forming get-together chat rooms probably fits with this concept, but I think kind of goes against the idea of exploration and finding those out-of-the-way places that Jasper and I are trying to bring across. Sites like Facebook and MySpace encourage you to go where all your friends are - when have you ever seen these sites encourage you to find people that hardly relate to you at all and figure them out?
I think social networking is great and all, but it doesn't really require you to step very far from your comfort zone, and it sorts of builds the expectation that every site should follow the same rules. Hopefully we can break out of this mentality of clustering together and encourage people to spread out a lot more.
Links For Me: Is Cyberspace Really a Space?
So, since I've been absolutely horrid in using this blog to document my progress, I decided that the rest of my postcount can be dedicated towards disseminating all the links that have been sent to me via del.icio.us, and settle for accumulating all the work Jasper and I have done in one page.
So, on to where I last left off.
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Is Cyberspace Really a Space?
This article mostly talks about how to make the concept of cyberspace appealing to a reader or viewer - rather than boring them with details of the technical aspect of the internet and data transfers, or going in depth to the point that people wouldn't even understand it anymore, it simply says that a simple metaphor will help make it interesting. Like, as the example used, in Neuromancer, a cyber "space," where various aspects of the underlying technologies manifest themselves as physical objects.
This pertains to the concept of our project in that we are trying to make the internet into a "space" - space as we actually know it. Data is manifested as physical planets and objects, distances between planets and solar systems depend on interconnectivity, and some of the underlying things like IPs determine space ports and other connections.
One of the things the author expresses concern about is the "distance" of a cyber "space." That making things actually have a distance and require time to get to takes away some of the magic of the near-instantaneous connections of the internet. I think our project addresses a concern like this by making space travel near instantaneous as well. Sure, we could make you sit through a minute of stars zipping past in order for the user to reach a "distant" planet - one that doesn't really relate to other pages all that much - but then I feel that would detract users from actually going to planets such as that, and users would then only stick to the common planets, the one close to each other, and not feel like they should be branching out.
All in all, this article touches on a lot of what we're trying to do with this project, which is make the internet into something people will want to understand and explore, because we've done all the legwork of making it understandable to the user.
So, on to where I last left off.
------------------------
Is Cyberspace Really a Space?
This article mostly talks about how to make the concept of cyberspace appealing to a reader or viewer - rather than boring them with details of the technical aspect of the internet and data transfers, or going in depth to the point that people wouldn't even understand it anymore, it simply says that a simple metaphor will help make it interesting. Like, as the example used, in Neuromancer, a cyber "space," where various aspects of the underlying technologies manifest themselves as physical objects.
This pertains to the concept of our project in that we are trying to make the internet into a "space" - space as we actually know it. Data is manifested as physical planets and objects, distances between planets and solar systems depend on interconnectivity, and some of the underlying things like IPs determine space ports and other connections.
One of the things the author expresses concern about is the "distance" of a cyber "space." That making things actually have a distance and require time to get to takes away some of the magic of the near-instantaneous connections of the internet. I think our project addresses a concern like this by making space travel near instantaneous as well. Sure, we could make you sit through a minute of stars zipping past in order for the user to reach a "distant" planet - one that doesn't really relate to other pages all that much - but then I feel that would detract users from actually going to planets such as that, and users would then only stick to the common planets, the one close to each other, and not feel like they should be branching out.
All in all, this article touches on a lot of what we're trying to do with this project, which is make the internet into something people will want to understand and explore, because we've done all the legwork of making it understandable to the user.
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