Cascade
At The New York Times R&D Lab, I ported Cascade, an interactive visualization by Jer Thorp and Mark Hansen, from its original Processing prototype to WebGL. I engineered the prototype into a robust web application that visualized how New York Times content spread through Twitter, maturing it for both large-scale internal demonstrations and as a potential product.
The WebGL implementation used custom shaders to animate hundreds of thousands of sharing events in real-time. Each vertex encoded its full transformation history, allowing the visualization to morph between temporal, structural, and conversational views without rebuilding geometry. The browser-based version matched the performance of the native Processing application, rendering complex 3D structures that users could navigate to explore how stories moved through Twitter over time.
