The good news is that even if you don’t configure the exact ports, the software is still able to generate landscapes albeit in a less creative way.Įach time you generate a unique world based on your day’s internet activities, it’s saved so that over time you can see how your worlds develop as your bandwidth usage habits change. PG can only detect protocols based on their developer-assigned ports so if you use non-standard ports, some tweaking of the configuration is needed. Visiting a website will result in the growth of an ‘HTTP Plant’ while sharing via BitTorrent or eMule will cause some ‘P2P Plants’ to appear. To brighten up the world, PacketGarden (PG) is able to grow virtual plants, relating to the protocols it detects being used on your network. Where they appear on your map is down to the geographic location of the servers you visit. Your uploads create hills on the landscape while downloads carve valleys, their respective heights and depths governed by the amounts of data you send or receive.
Packet Garden does this by remembering the servers you visit, their location and the sort of data you are accessing and converting it into a 3D landscape. Indeed, any type of internet traffic can be used to develop your creation, including online gaming and email. This open-source software which is available in Windows, Linux and OS X flavors, can capture data concerning your daily BitTorrent, eMule, LimeWire, Soulseek, HTTP, FTP and IRC transfers and use them to ‘grow’ a 3D digital ‘garden’ you can explore.
According to its homepage, Packet Garden is ‘an experimental artwork that seeks to provide an alternative and accessible approach to visualising daily internet use’ and I would agree, this is a good description.