Examples Gallery

Every scene below ships in the GlyphViz examples set — download it once and every page's Try it line is one drag-and-drop away. Most examples also include the generator script that produced them, so they double as recipes for visualizing your own data.

Download the examples (GlyphViz_Examples.zip)

~354 MB download, ~756 MB extracted

You can also take just one. Every page below has its own download button, and the examples that hold several scenes offer one zip per scene — most are a few megabytes. Each single-example zip contains that scene's files at its top level: extract it and you have one self-contained folder, or drag the zip onto the GlyphViz window and it extracts beside itself and loads.

Install notes and good first scenes: Installation → Example scenes.

Starter demos

• Topology Tour — all 18 topologies side by side
• Topology Animations — twelve animated scenes that sweep each topology's placement axes one at a time
• Channel Parameters — one station per Channels-bindable attribute
• Color Palettes — the 26 built-in palettes, ready to recolor live
• Sine Wave Channels — the smallest end-to-end Channels demo
• Rotation Conventions — Heading/Tilt/Roll vs Euler XYZ, side by side
• Texture Animation — flipbook texture animation via Channels
• Mood Background — Channels animating the background itself

Teaching worlds

Scenes that are a place rather than a dataset — built to be flown through and read, with every glyph carrying its own explanation.

• The Armillary World — a real armillary sphere, ringed by eight zones of mathematics

AI Observatory

Scenes that look inside a language model while it reads: every feature it represents, placed by meaning, lit up token by token, with sound.

• Inside GPT-2: Mary and John — watch GPT-2 small work out who gets the drink
• Inside Gemma: Why It Says No — a chat model recognizes a phishing request as fraud and turns toward "I cannot", compared token by token with a harmless twin

The making of GlyphViz

GlyphViz was built by Jeff Sale working with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. This scene is that collaboration's own record.

• Building GlyphViz: Every Session — all 222 working sessions that built the desktop app and GlyphViz Web, one helical column each: every prompt, every stretch of thinking, every tool call and commit

San Diego River Watershed Atlas

One watershed, built up in phases: its terrain and river network first, then the weather, water and fire that cross it, all on the same map.

• The Watershed, Source to Sea — 433 square miles of real relief, the whole river network by stream order, gauges and rain stations
• The Pulse: A Century of the San Diego River — river flow and mountain rain, month by month since 1912, with the whole century on a panel beside it
• The Storm Winter, 2004–05 — one of the wettest winters on record, day by day: 18 rain gauges across the county and the river answering each storm
• The May 2014 Fire Siege — eight fires and a Santa Ana as a space-time cube: 128 weather stations, 2,654 fire alerts and every fire at its real place and moment
• The Burn Record: San Diego County Wildfires, 1910–2025 — every mapped fire since 1910, laid down as layers: ground that keeps burning rises into striped stacks, coloured by era
• After the Cedar Fire — every storm since 1960 on a burned creek and an unburned one, measured against what that storm normally gave: the first rain on the burn scar ran 46 times higher
• Santa Ana Wind, December 2012 — 130 weather stations every ten minutes for a month, as the wind swings offshore and the county dries out

Audio & music

• Bird Song Spectrogram Surface — a birdsong spectrogram as animated terrain
• Cat Scan — Audio Animation — 64 frequency bands dancing to Tangerine Dream
• Cat Scan Synesthesia — a 4,529-node music-synesthesia sphere
• Four Instruments in C Major — four instruments, one spectral array
• Moby — Go — the spectral array driven by a dance classic
• Violin in A Major — a solo violin's harmonics made visible
• Warm Winter: One Glyph per Instrument — a seven-track session read one instrument at a time, as a column that blooms with the music

Maps & terrain

• Cowles Mountain Terrain — real DEM terrain as a Surface topology
• Multi-Hike Ghost Race — six GPS hikes racing up real terrain
• San Diego Seismicity — 66 years of earthquakes on a World Grid
• RSS News Globe — world news as concept towers on a globe
• Tropical Cyclones — 184 years of storms, wind speed as height
• Earth's Magnetic Field — four centuries of secular variation
• The Wind Rose as a Hyperglyph — the standard chart, nested three levels deep
• City Climate Rings — a year of climate for 31 cities, a clock face of months around each one, built from a spreadsheet with the Claude Skill

Orbital traffic

Three scenes built from live CelesTrak element sets, each animating a different way: scene 1 by an external generator loop and Watch and Reload, scene 2 by Channels playback, and scene 3 by nothing at all.

• Orbital Traffic — Live Sky — every tracked satellite where it is right now, once a second
• Orbital Traffic — One Orbit — a 93-minute revolution replayed in twenty seconds
• Orbital Traffic — Orbital Shells — the orbital planes themselves, turning by themselves

Education data

• California STAR Test Scores — a decade of school test scores as glyph trees
• SES Achievement Gap Terrain — the achievement gap as the space between two surfaces
• District Heatmap — ten years of school data over satellite imagery

Global Terrorism Database

• GTD — Organization Profiles — a readable rosette per organization
• GTD — Event Cloud — ~205k incidents, one node each
• GTD — Org–Event Network — organizations linked to their events
• GTD — Time Replay — fifty years replayed in sixty seconds
• GTD — Campaign Pulse — campaign intensity as breathing rosettes

Vehicle sales

• Vehicle Sales — Market Galaxy — the used-car market as an orbiting galaxy
• Vehicle Sales — Depreciation Grid — depreciation curves standing in relief
• Vehicle Sales — Raw Auction Field — 20,000 raw records, ~100k nodes, and a tag vocabulary that turns Select By into an analytic filter

Hockey history

• The Breathing Century — a century of hockey growing season by season
• The Century Swarm — 29,140 player-seasons in scoring phase space
• Duel of Dynasties — three careers as animated orreries

Networks & graphs

• Collaboration Networks — who physics actually works with, force-laid-out in 3D
• Trust and Betrayal — the Bitcoin OTC web of trust, every trader a hyperglyph

Science & personal data

• The Cosmic Web — 43,414 real galaxies, all sky, in three dimensions
• The Periodic System — the table as a helix of nested atoms
• Decay Chains — sixteen chains whose depth is the data
• YBCO Superconductor — crystal structure meets its physics
• Protein Import (PDB) — an ideal α-helix through the PDB importer
• LIDAR Import (LAS/LAZ) — 442,767 aerial laser returns, every one a real node
• Flocking (Boids) — a boids murmuration baked into Channels
• AutoSleep — A Year of Sleep — a year of sleep as monthly towers
• Hacking Creativity Glyph — one person's creative style as one glyph
• RFC Genealogy — 57 years of internet standards and what replaced what