Grow a World from Network Traffic

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

With each day of network activity a new world can be generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and visit as time goes by. You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.

Each time we use a computer and connect to the internet, there are ports that were open and sending out tiny little packets all around your network.

It can be Peer to Peer applications, Instant Messaging applications, checking an email, browsing on the web, uploading a file through FTP, or even playing games online.

All of that generates information which is used and presented with a beautiful visualization called Packet Garden.

Packet Garden was developed by Julian Oliver, originally an experimental artwork that seeks to provide an alternative and accessible approach to visualizing daily internet use. It runs on every platform that we had Windows, Linux, and even OS X computers :D

You will have a unique 3D virtual world that built to your network usage :) For example, if you download something, then it will be represented as valleys with the size matching how big the data are ;) and vice versa for uploading which represented in hills :D


For each type of traffic, you'll see a different type of plant for each type of traffic ;)


After you installed the Packet Garden, you need to capture a traffic first, and then you can grow a world :) you can load it the next time you wanted to visit this world :) if you go inside the world, you'll become a little ball :P and can move around, too bad you cannot zoom out/in :P

Anyway, if you have a decent PC, this will run pretty smooth ;)

Have a try :) it's fun :D




[via: o'reilly radar]