Packet Garden is a network visualization tool that maps your network traffic into a 3D representation, sprouting little plants on a globe whenever a connection is made.
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.
Packet Garden is GNU licenced and written in Python, so you can give it a try on supported Linux, Windows, and Mac machines. It doesn’t run on Intel macs, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, Soya3D (the 3D library it uses) is the culprit and has not been compiled under this architecture. Anyone want to take a stab at porting this? I’m not familiar with the package, but it might be as simple as installing all Soya’s required libraries and running a python make script.
Packet Garden. Grow a world from network traffic – Link
Soya3D – Link
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