Explore your internet usage
Packet Garden is an experimental project which allows you to visit your internet usage in a 3D generated world. The application works by capturing packets from your daily internet traffic, from which it creates a 3D garden where websites you visit are represented as plants and mountains. Basically, the more you visit a site the bigger a mountain it becomes. While the generated image looks and feels pretty raw, you can still go around the planet, take screenshots and see the IP tag for each element. Gardens you have created can also be saved and revisited later on.
Packet Garden still feels very much like a project in development. As previously said, graphics are pretty limited. Explanations on the generated environment are also lacking. Despite these shortcomings we quite like Packet Garden, which offers a very original perspective on your daily internet usage. More creative users will be able to generate very singular words rich of data.
Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.
To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.
None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it’s used to grow a personal landscape, a kind of ‘walk-in graph’ uniquely shaped by the way you use the internet. 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.
