WebGL-galaxy from Wikipedia articles

Something similar to the Eye of Sauron is the result of rendering Wikipedia articles with building links between them. Star clusters are thematically related and linked articles. This is the idea of ​​the author of the project WikiGalaxy , a French student Owen Cornec (Owen Cornec).

Clicking on each star opens the corresponding article and links to other articles. In a separate "flight" mode (fly-mode), navigation from star to star occurs with each click. In the upper left corner of the screen is the search box, if you want to find something. The current beta version of WikiGalaxy contains only 100,000 article stars, but the student promises to add more in the future.

Made on WebGL, the interface runs in Firefox and Chrome, but will slow down on most computers. So in practice you will not use it, although it looks very beautiful.
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Technically, the article graph is constructed using queries to the Wikipedia PHP API Python script and Urliib3.

The resulting graph in the .dot format with article identifiers and links was loaded into the Gephi data visualization program. Having chosen the most attractive form of visualization, the author exported the result into GDV format with the coordinates of each node, and then converted it into a compact JSON file with another Python script.

In parallel, he developed a visualization for the web on Three.js, a fairly convenient WebGL library. Most of the information displayed is dynamically invoked by requests to the Wikipedia API.

In the future, Owen Kornek is going to port this program to the Oculus Rift virtual reality interface.