Delta

Delta was a real-time WebGL visualization of nytimes.com traffic, displaying hundreds of thousands of page views as individual dots moving through space. Controlled with a PlayStation 3 controller, it offered two views: geographical (where dots appeared at visitor locations and drifted into space over time) and site structure (where dots traced paths between pages in an arc-based layout).

I conceived, designed, and engineered Delta at The New York Times R&D Lab, building everything from the data pipeline to the WebGL renderer. The system transformed raw event streams into a living map of how millions of readers moved through the news each day.

Green dots showed new visitors arriving, red showed internal navigation, blue lines traced common routes. The visualization revealed patterns invisible in traditional analytics — surges of global interest during breaking news, the ripple effects of homepage placement, the quiet overnight hours when international readers took over.

Each view was rendered using custom shaders that could animate hundreds of thousands of vertices in real-time, with events appearing 2-3 minutes after occurring in the real world.

elsewhere

• Seeing From Above, 2015 New York R Conference
• The New York Times, 2015