midterm: Datafall (nee Network Clouds)

Data visualization is something i've been interested in for a little while now. I first became aware of the technique of making normally invisible data visible, in my step-dad's lab. He would run ELISA tests (Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay) and gel stains on lab results from his experiments. What he was checking for in particular, i'm not 100% sure on, but it doesn't really matter either. I just remember being really impressed with the action of transmuting one kind of information into another (visual) kind.

Thus, here I am, on the computer, and on a network, for 90% of my day, and naturally I find myself interested in what kinds of activity takes place over, ahem, "Information Super-Highways" (yes, i said it). Aside from natural curiousity, this was also inspired, in part, by a piece of software that my friend John made. It is an application which translates network activity into sound. It is written in java and can be downloaded here.

I originally had called my project Network Clouds, because i envisioned making just that.. rain clouds, if you will, each of which represent a port that has activity happening on it. The properties of the raining particles would relate to certain characteristics of the information moving through the port (number of bytes transmitted, frequency of transmission, length of transmission, http response code, ip address the request was coming from, etc).

For the purpose of this particular demo, I went and grabbed some ftp info from The Internet Traffic Archive. This is a pretty neat place on the intarweb where one can find, uh, archived sets of network data.

The waterfall I made relates to the data in the following way:
- The width of each particle stream is determined by the length of transmission time per packet.
- The grey-scale shade is determined by the frequency of packet transmission. (Were there requests every 2 seconds, every 1 second, 6 seconds, etc)

That's it for now, actually, but I am planning on tweaking it more. I'm new to particle systems, so I still have a tendency to break things when fiddling with them. Ideally, it would work like this:

- Width of particle stream is determined by the number of bytes sent per transmission
- Color or shade is determined by the total number of requests made for the packet
- Acceleration of particles is set by the frequency of packet transmission
- Lifespan of particles are determined by the length of transmission time

Current visualization of this project can be seen here.