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  • A dense field of thousands of colorful car-shaped glyphs, each colored by its real exterior paint color

    Vehicle Sales — Raw Auction Field · ~100,000 nodes, one per auction record, colored by real paint color

  • Thousands of colorful spike towers rising off a satellite-textured world map

    Global Terrorism Database — Event Cloud · ~205,000 incidents over a real satellite basemap

  • A coral-like bloom of pastel colored glyphs arranged in concentric rings

    Cat Scan Synesthesia · a 4,529-node music-synesthesia sphere, driven by audio

  • A ring of vertical towers built from stacked discs, representing a century of hockey franchises

    The Breathing Century · a century of NHL hockey, animated season by season

  • A textured globe of Earth with colorful cube towers rising from news hotspots

    RSS News Globe · world news as concept towers, live on a globe

  • A dense swarm of thousands of red, yellow, and blue spheres

    The Century Swarm · 29,140 player-seasons in scoring phase space

  • Three colorful interlocking rings of glyphs, like orbiting orreries

    Duel of Dynasties · three hockey careers as animated orreries

  • An aerial map plate with a zoom-callout frustum of colored earthquake hypocenters glowing beneath it

    San Diego Seismicity · 66 years of earthquakes on a real-world map grid

GlyphViz

A 3D hierarchical visualization toolkit for hyperdimensional data.

GlyphViz renders structured data — node hierarchies, time series, gene networks, EEG signal fields, strange attractors — as navigable 3D scenes. It is built in the lineage of ANTz, extending its node/tag model into a modern Python toolkit while preserving exact rendering fidelity with the original.

GlyphViz is not a charting library. It treats data structure as scene structure — hierarchy becomes spatial nesting, relationships become topology, and dimensions beyond the third are recovered through projective geometry rather than discarded.

An interactive 3D scene showing GlyphViz's own node hierarchy: an indigo torus parent orbited by a teal sphere, an indigo cylinder, and a coral cone, with a smaller sphere orbiting the teal sphere as its own child node. Drag to rotate the view.

Drag to orbit — this is a live render of GlyphViz's own node hierarchy: parent, children, and one grandchild.

Every frame in the carousel above is an actual GlyphViz scene — no mockups. Full source and data for each ships in the Examples Gallery.

Try it right now — no install

GlyphViz Web is a full browser implementation: open the link, drag in a node CSV, and you're in a live scene — nothing to download, nothing to install. It's a from-scratch WebGL rewrite (Three.js), not a stripped-down port, reading the same native gv_ scene format as desktop, and it has closed most of the gap with the desktop app — node creation and editing, selection, tags, Channels animation, color palettes, even cross-eye stereo 3D all work in-browser today.

…including in VR

Open that same link in a headset's browser and press Enter VR, and you are standing inside the scene — fly through it, grab and resize it with both hands, point at a glyph to select it, all from a wrist-mounted control panel. It's WebXR: no app to sideload, no PC-VR link, no cable. Confirmed on a Meta Quest 3; any WebXR-capable headset browser, Apple Vision Pro included, should work the same way.

Launch GlyphViz Web VR controls Prefer the desktop app?

Why GlyphViz

  • Hierarchical by design — node and tag relationships map directly onto 3D spatial hierarchy, the way ANTz originally intended.
  • Validated, not just tested — every release is checked against a golden-master oracle: the original ANTz C renderer, instrumented to dump its exact transformation matrices, compared frame-for-frame against GlyphViz's output.
  • Built for real scientific data — spatiotemporal EEG, RNA-seq expression networks, longitudinal health records, and chaotic dynamical systems are first-class use cases, not afterthoughts.
  • Hyperdimensional-aware — when your data has more than three dimensions, GlyphViz doesn't just drop the rest. Projective geometry and phase-space embedding techniques (Takens delay embedding, strange attractor reconstruction) bring higher-dimensional structure into a space you can actually navigate.
  • Everywhere you want it — the desktop renderer (glyphviz_gl) and the OpenXR spike (glyphviz_xr) share one core engine (glyphviz_core); GlyphViz Web is a separate, browser-native implementation of that same scene format, with its own WebXR immersive mode. So the same CSV opens in the full desktop app, in a browser tab with no install, or in a headset — from one link.

Where to start

  • A DEM terrain surface rendered in GlyphViz

    New to GlyphViz?

    Get it installed and render your first scene in a few minutes.

    Quickstart

  • A ring of orbiting glyphs representing a node hierarchy

    Want to understand the model first?

    Nodes, tags, hierarchy, and how the ANTz lineage shapes everything.

    Core Concepts

  • Colorful data points over a satellite map

    Want to see what's possible?

    Real visualizations — EEG fields, gene networks, strange attractors — with full source.

    Examples Gallery

  • A YBCO superconductor crystal structure rendered in GlyphViz

    Curious where this is headed?

    WebXR deployment, an AI-to-topology bridge, and the long-range plan.

    Roadmap

GlyphViz is under active development. This documentation site is a working scaffold — most sections are placeholders being filled in incrementally.