I often find myself wanting to visualize information in 3D, and finally got around to implementing something, called Aethergraph. I find it useful for:
- absorbing complex information (like the phylogentic tree of life)
- understanding complex discussion threads from Reddit or Hacker News
- viewing adhoc datasets without updating the code (see ‘Google Sheets-based visualization’ below).
Aethergraph has a couple default datasets, including:
- Tree of Life: Explore how living things are interconnected. Tips:
- Drag the nodes around for easier viewability.
- Use the search element to look up particular animals (e.g. Cows)
- Right click on a node and select ‘view wiki’ to learn more.
- Right click and select ‘collapse’ if you want to reduce the number of visible datapoints.
- Reddit / Hacker News: The posts are individual nodes, and the size/color is based on how many likes/comments. You can see the top comments. Tips:
- Right click and select ‘view link’ to see the actual content
- Right click and select ‘view expanded’ to see the full discussion (all the comments)
You can also use the ‘load custom’ to look at individual Reddit posts, Hacker News posts, or your own Google Sheet-based datasets.
For Google Sheets-based visualization:
- the sheet needs to be viewable by the public
- the first tab needs to be the nodes, and have the data structure:
- id (e.g. name)
- decimal variable used to drive the node size (e.g. age)
- decimal variable use to drive the node color (e.g. height)
- the second tab needs to be the edges, and have the data structure:
- source id
- destination id
- decimal variable used to drive the edge size (e.g. relationship strength)
- decimal variable use to drive the edge color (e.g. height)
It’s still a work-in-progress, so stay tuned for new features and functionality.