Tings

Tings is a silly a little unfinished prototype that searches Wikipedia for a topic and chooses an image from the Wikipedia page and uses that to represent the topic in 3D space.  Clicking on a topic box adds a child to that topic that represents another article linked within the body of the parent article. Clicking on the same node multiple times will add more linked children. Mousing over a topic box shows the first paragraph of the topic article, and you can click through to the full Wikipedia article. 

It's inspired by something a friend (Ray Mazza) made during early development of The Sims 3. 

I used to hold these bi-weekly "idea jams" where I'd propose a topic that was vaguely abstractly related to The Sims (e.g. relationships, genetics, etc.).  I'd announce the topic on Friday, and the designers and I would spend the weekend pontificating and all day Monday coding.  At the end of the day Monday, we'd sit together and demo them to each other, discuss our thinking and launch into brainstorming for the game they were paying us to make :).  Most never turned into anything concrete, but many found their way into the shipped game as smaller mechanic or influenced future designs.

The topic that led to the original prototype was just "ideas"... with the thinking that we could explore how ideas, concepts, rumors, etc. are formed, propagated, connected and shared.

CONTROLS

- Left-click a node to add a child (an associated link from the topic/node's wikipedia page)

- Right-click and drag to pan the view

- Middle-mouse wheel to zoom

- Mouse over any node to see the summary of the topic

- Hold ctrl and left-click to lock/unlock a node to keep it from moving

- Hold ctrl and right-click to open the source article on Wikipedia in an external browser

NOTE: A node with no image just means the page had no relevant images in it.