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Hangout with FoamTrees

  • Writer: janalumi
    janalumi
  • Oct 26, 2023
  • 2 min read

A while back I was interested in Voronoi diagrams. They reminded me of bubbles and tree canopies. Where a seed grows into a defined space, taking shape to form meaning, while

intersections (lines or gaps) are opportunities to find connections between defined concepts.

Also, around that time I was taking a Knowledge Discovery course where I was introduced to Carrot², a search engine that applies clustering algorithms to text based searches. I was interested in making exploratory link pages. Those who had access to the internet in the 90s will remember these, for everybody else, these where pages that linked you to other pages. This was useful when there was no search engine. At that time, you had to know the address of the site you wanted, or you needed to find the address in another site.

I wanted to bring back that sense of exploration, the clicking through webpages, as though navigating a forest of trees, where every page was another canopy of trees that would take you on a path through the forest into new tree clusters.

FoamTrees look like tree canopies. The lines of each polygon are the gaps between trees (crown shyness) in a forest. I have made several such FoamTrees, here is one I made for collaboration tools. It’s a little buggy, so just refresh the screen (ctrl + R) if it gets stuck. It should also work on your phone.



The people at Carrot Search have provided an API and a useful gallery of FoamTree samples. I have worked with a few of them to make several link pages and a photo catalogue.



Links


Images made with Stable Diffusion in Dreamstudio.ai

 
 
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