Visitorville: A 3D view of website traffic
Today's top video-game designer are masters at visualizing information. Every time I buy a new piece of software or use a new website and discover that it's got a horrid, horrid user interface, I always think -- why didn't they hire a good game designer to do this? The best games are superb at collating massive amounts of information and quickly displaying them in psychologically nuanced ways, rendering rapidly-changing streams of data -- your health, your speed, your location, dialogue -- as twinkling, glanceable ambient icons. Much like a superbly designed car dashboard, a good video-game display brings Edward Tuftean concision to the art of visualizing information.
Thus I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville -- an application that takes a website's traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it:
Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There's a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer!
Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.).
To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks -- or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)
Pretty cool. Though it'd be even cooler to have the reverse: A java application that takes your web site and renders it as a 3D city, so that visitors navigate it like a game inside their web browsers.
(Thanks to Roger Spence for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at February 07, 2006 10:12 PM
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It's Snow Crash! Finally!
Posted by: priceyeah at February 7, 2006 11:52 PM
Hehe, that last idea--rendering websites like buildings so visitors can walk through them--could be such a cool universe. I've often had this same idea, but each webmaster is the "god" of that website and creates a world for visitors to travel in. Each world could contain some kind of valuable & unique item (a weapon or weapon modification, or a character attribute modification) or items that were forged by the god of that website. The whole collection of websites--with various disparate webmasters--is the online world.
Each webmaster would be encouraged to "cheat" by making themselves invulnerable in their own world and possibly in other worlds. Visitors would avoid those who are too powerful or have bad personalities. Visitors would be attracted to cool worlds, cunning puzzles, and valuable items.
Posted by: Alfred Cloutier at February 8, 2006 11:51 AM
Robot, I know you have a game POV, but I actually hate trying to make data conform to a 3D physicality. I certainly worked on sites like that in '95 and '96. And I am a big fan of immersive experiences. But most content already exists in its best form. Putting a layer of metaphor makes it harder to interact with the data.
OTOH, doing it simply for the purpose of looking cool is a reaons I can get behind.
Posted by: MoXmas at February 8, 2006 1:26 PM
So where do you see this sort of interface, or maybe the whole concept of interface, going in the long term? There's shades of Neuromancer here. Does it say something about a human need to have their online experience be as 'real' as possible? Or, do you think that in a broader sense we are redefining what constitutes 'real' to include the possibility of creating the conditions to (metaphorically speaking) make cyberspace fit for human colonization?
Am I making any sense whatsover?
Posted by: Hackistan at February 8, 2006 6:43 PM
Heh -- yeah, I love the Snow Crashian goodness here, and Neuromancer too. Alfred, yes, that would be brilliant!
And MoXmas, that's true -- for actual utility, which is to say, actual ease of transmitting information, these 3D site would be horrifically bad. As places that are simply cool to visit, they'd rock!
Posted by: Clive at February 8, 2006 10:42 PM
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could become the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten
years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
"Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.
"Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right to just be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got."
Posted by: baturkey at February 10, 2006 10:59 AM
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It's Snow Crash! Finally!
Posted by: priceyeah![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 7, 2006 11:52 PM
Hehe, that last idea--rendering websites like buildings so visitors can walk through them--could be such a cool universe. I've often had this same idea, but each webmaster is the "god" of that website and creates a world for visitors to travel in. Each world could contain some kind of valuable & unique item (a weapon or weapon modification, or a character attribute modification) or items that were forged by the god of that website. The whole collection of websites--with various disparate webmasters--is the online world.
Each webmaster would be encouraged to "cheat" by making themselves invulnerable in their own world and possibly in other worlds. Visitors would avoid those who are too powerful or have bad personalities. Visitors would be attracted to cool worlds, cunning puzzles, and valuable items.
Posted by: Alfred Cloutier![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 8, 2006 11:51 AM
Robot, I know you have a game POV, but I actually hate trying to make data conform to a 3D physicality. I certainly worked on sites like that in '95 and '96. And I am a big fan of immersive experiences. But most content already exists in its best form. Putting a layer of metaphor makes it harder to interact with the data.
OTOH, doing it simply for the purpose of looking cool is a reaons I can get behind.
Posted by: MoXmas![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 8, 2006 1:26 PM
So where do you see this sort of interface, or maybe the whole concept of interface, going in the long term? There's shades of Neuromancer here. Does it say something about a human need to have their online experience be as 'real' as possible? Or, do you think that in a broader sense we are redefining what constitutes 'real' to include the possibility of creating the conditions to (metaphorically speaking) make cyberspace fit for human colonization?
Am I making any sense whatsover?
Posted by: Hackistan![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 8, 2006 6:43 PM
Heh -- yeah, I love the Snow Crashian goodness here, and Neuromancer too. Alfred, yes, that would be brilliant!
And MoXmas, that's true -- for actual utility, which is to say, actual ease of transmitting information, these 3D site would be horrifically bad. As places that are simply cool to visit, they'd rock!
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 8, 2006 10:42 PM
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could become the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
"Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach.
"Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right to just be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got."
Posted by: baturkey![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 10, 2006 10:59 AM