This project was performed at our institute for the Steirische Landesausstellung 2000: comm.graz2000. The exhibition tried to show technical achievements and, besides other topics, wanted to present a visualization of the internet. This rather abstract idea was substantiated by a team consisting of Dipl.-Ing. Heinz Mayer, Alexander Bornik, Markus Grabner and me in cooperation with the artist Winfried Ritsch, who had the basic idea.
Visualizing the whole internet is a rather hard problem, due to the huge amount of internet hosts already on-line. So we decided from start to visualize only as many hosts as possible.
The concept of the project was as follows:
- a linux cluster consisting of 4 machines sends a *ping* to nearly every IP-Address in range
- each host which answers to this ping is stored in a list of possible nodes
- the list of possible hosts is sequentially scanned and a *routetrace* is started with the host as argument
- all successful routes and its final host are stored in a database (MySQL)
- the hosts in the database are prepared for rendering and transmitted to another database holding a consistent set
of renderable internet hosts
- a rendering application loads hosts and routes from the graphical database
- a host's IP-address determines a coordinate in 3D-space (mapping of 32-bit IP to (x,y,z)
- every host is rendered as a sphere, existing routes between hosts are represented with cylinders
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Demonstration of the complexity of the visualization in FLY mode
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For the visualization the following setup was used:
- a Pentium III 550MHz processor (we are talking of March/April 2000) with 512MB RAM running Windows 2000
- an Evans & Sutherland Tornado 3000 graphics adapter with two VGA Outputs, 64MB Graphics-RAM and 64MB Texture-RAM
- two LCD beamer with a resolution of 1024x768, the beamers were prepared with horizontically and vertically polarized filter glasses
- a large-screen projection wall (280 x 210 cm)
- stereo filter glasses with orthogonally polarized filters, which created the stereoscopic cue together with the two beamers and its
polarization filters
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Demonstration of the complexity of the visualization in FLY mode
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Some features of the developed rendering software:
- hierarchical organization of the huge amount of data by using an Octree datastructure where each Octree cell
consists of exactly one sphere
- different precomputed Levels of Detail of the Spheres and Cylinders, the fixed number of LOD representations is
refined by a Geomporphing procedure
- by regarding the projected screen-space of primitives an additional Level of Detail calculation is performed
(e.g. distant spheres are rendered as a single pixel)
- spheres and active cylinder are texture mapped
- automatic animation modes implemented using quaternions for rotations
- calculation of the two separate stereoscopic views for the beamers
- 3 possible user interaction modes provided by a joystick
- FLY MODE: user is able to freely fly around in the scene
- TRACE/WALK MODE: user is able to walk from one host to another by selecting one of the possible neighbour spheres,
here information about the host is displayed if available
- EMAIL MODE: user selects a pre-defined route and an email represented by a blue cube is transported
along this route (automatic animation)
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EMAIL on its way through the net, the yellow cylinder shows the current route
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EMAIL has arrived at a certain host
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© 2005 by Martin Urschler
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