1. What is 3DGeoStats?
It's a three dimensional visualization of the earth showing arbitrary statistical data. The data relative to geo coordinates is represented as light beams - the higher and thicker the beam, the higher the value of the data point. The 3D visualization is done in Actionscript 3 and Papervision3D.

2. Who did this and why?
bytepark - based in Berlin (Germany) - created this. We are a communications agency that supports companies throughout their marketing activities. The spectrum of our services includes the intermedia design and realisation of solutions tailored to our customers' needs. We mainly develop high-scale web applications for corporate customers. We also enjoy doing data visualization in general and have always been looking for a good test case for using Papervision3D. We also wanted to have a nice application for our leisure lounge in the office entrance hall.

3. What does the Demo show?
We use the access data from some of the websites that we manage. The monitored websites in this demo range from 30,000 to 1,000,000 page impressions per month. All of the tracked page impressions are sent to the 3DGeoStats application within a couple of seconds and are shown as beams on the globe. The more hits from a city the thicker the beam gets (and then disappears after a certain amount of time). The total number of page impressions per day is also shown, as well as the current cities from where the hits are coming.

4. Ok, how does it work?
The application pulls data repeatedly at a set frequency and displays it in chronological order (so to say, a replay). There is a small delay from the website page impression to the display on the 3D application in order to minimize the network traffic and server load. Actually, if you track several websites at once there is also an info window showing you which domains the hits are coming from. For reasons of anonymity, in this demo we have disabled this feature.

5. How do I use it?
Simply sit and wait. As soon as there is a hit on any website that we are tracking, the name of the city where the visitor comes from will be shown on the info site, and a beam of light will appear at the geo position of the user. In the upper left corner, you can see a changing bar representing the current frame rate that your computer is capable of showing. At the bottom you can zoom in on the globe or give the globe a horizontal or vertical spin. You can also switch to fullscreen or turn the anti-aliasing on (this is especially designed for those gamers with big-daddy graphic cards and CPUs).

6. What are the requirements for 3DGeoStats?
All you need is a web browser and the Adobe Flash Player plug-in version 9.X or above (although we recommend the newest flash player for maximum performance as well as full screen capabilities on certain operating systems). Of course, you also need Internet connectivity. Also, a reasonable CPU speed of at least 1GHz and a graphic card without shared memory is recommended. For full screen mode, your graphic board ought to be capable of hardware acceleration.

7. What is the status of 3DGeoStats?
We are currently using an alpha version, meaning it is mostly functional in our internal environment, but it might blow up the whole Internet if fully released. :-) We are already visualizing real website access of production websites with 3DGeoStats and will release a public version that can be used for your own website soon.

8. Will 3DGeoStats be free?
There will definitely be a free (but maybe ad-supported) version for your website, but there will also a pro version for corporate entities. Stay tuned for further details.

9. What else can one do with 3DGeoStats?
In addition to the current demo, which visualizes live website page impressions, we can show all arbitrary statistical data with reference to geo coordinates. This could be the worldwide distribution of your customers, the number and location of restaurants you prefer, the position of all your friends... you name it. We have a lot of ideas on where this could go.

10. I want to take part in the alpha test and have my website access visualized. What should I do?
Simply enter your email address on the sign-up page and we will inform you when the test starts. As we can only accept a limited number of test site, please do not despair if you are not accepted. There will also be some kind of a public beta afterwards - we promise. Email addresses will not be used for other purposes, and all data is deleted once we have selected the testers.

11. What about privacy?
When websites are tracked, only the city, country and date of access gets logged. The IP address of the user is not saved, nor is any other data that could identify a single user. In the future, more information could be logged, but always according to German privacy laws, which are fairly strict in this matter.

11. I have an idea. Can you do foo or implement bar?
Maybe we can. Send us an email to mail@3dgeostats.com and let us know what you would like to see.