We’ve been using E15 to experiment with different layouts of web content in a 3D environment. The Python scripting interface makes it possible for us to have access to a wide variety of datasets using existing libraries to grab content from blogs, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, and just about any other site with an API or RSS feed. What to do with the web content is a much more challenging problem than actually acquiring the content.

In some early sketches of web content layouts, I had arranged webpages around the perimeter of a circle. While searching for more interesting equations to use for laying out pages, I found an awesome Wikipedia page called List of Curves with over 50 different types of mathematical curves. The problem with this page, however, is that it has no pictures of the curves. I want to see what all the curves look like, but I’m not about to click through every single page, one at a time.

So, I wrote a Python script that uses the MediaWiki API for Wikipedia to find all the articles linked from the List of Curves article, finds the images linked from those articles, and finally renders all the images in E15 with the relevant article titles:

If you’re curious about how these pages were laid out, I used a rose curve with 8 petals — pictures of this curve are in the middle of the screenshot below:

One more screenshot:

I’ll be working with the same data more this week, so check back soon for more images, and probably a video or two!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.