ai a research survey assembled by Claude — not Ivan's prose.

glyph3d-js · research notes

Who else renders a whole codebase, all at once?

A field survey of everything that has tried to put an entire git repository in front of you as one navigable thing — and an honest account of what is actually alive today.

This is a catalogue of prior art for spatial, whole-repository code visualization: the tools, the research prototypes, and the rendering techniques underneath them, with their current status and direct links. glyph3d-js appears in it as one entry among many — Volume 06 locates it in the taxonomy. The point of the rest is the trail: who built what, when, and whether you can still open it.

It was assembled from a deep multi-pass search in May 2026: VISSOFT and SOFTVIS proceedings back to 2003, IEEE VR / ISMAR / CHI programming-tools tracks, university thesis repositories, defunct startups, low-star GitHub repos, and the GPU-text-rendering literature. Every link was checked at the time of writing. Status labels are a snapshot — the dead come back, the living rot.

The split. "Render a codebase spatially" divides cleanly in two. The large, well-cited branch renders metaphors — buildings, islands, streets, galaxies — where the source text is at most a tooltip. The small branch renders the actual source text as the spatial primitive. That second branch has roughly six research prototypes in fifteen years; almost none were open-sourced, none are GPU-instanced at repo scale, and the closest published 3D precedent is Code Park, a 2017 UCF master's thesis that was never released. The two volumes you'd read to see this for yourself: 01 (rendered text) for the small branch, 02 (code cities) for the large one.

The six volumes

  1. 01The Rendered-Text Lineage Prototypes that put actual readable source code in spatial space — Code Bubbles, Code Canvas, Code Park (the UCF one), CodeHouse, IDEvelopAR, Primrose, VRIDE, Haystack, Padioleau's Codemap — plus the empirical work on whether people can read code in 3D at all. The core of the survey.
  2. 02The City Tradition Wettel's CodeCity and everything downstream — ExplorViz, IslandViz, CodeMetropolis, EvoStreets/SoftVis3D, CityVR, VR City, GoCity/JSCity/PHPCity, CodeCharta, SecCityVR. Buildings, not text. What's alive, what's archived.
  3. 03VR IDEs & Commercial Code Maps Primitive.io (the VR code IDE that stalled), CodeSee (acquired into GitKraken), Sourcetrail (open-sourced, lives in a fork), CodeScene, CAST Imaging, Structure101, Glamorous Toolkit — and confirmation that the web IDEs (Codespaces, vscode.dev, Gitpod) do nothing spatial.
  4. 04Web Toys & Generative Art Gource, code_swarm, Codeology, CodeFlower, GitHub's repo-visualizer, anvaka's galaxies, the contribution-graph cities, GitDiagram, CodeBoarding, and Adam Tornhill's crime-scene tooling. Which of these can you still open?
  5. 05Rendering Text at Scale The engine layer: Slug (released into the public domain in 2026), MSDF, troika-three-text and why it stalls at ~500 instances, Zed's GPUI, Makepad, Glamorous Toolkit's Bloc, the instanced-glyph papers, and the 2002 Linux-kernel-in-3D demo.
  6. 06Where glyph3d-js Sits The synthesis: the slot glyph3d-js occupies in the taxonomy, the projects that occupied it before and what happened to them, the structural reasons it keeps emptying out, and the citations that anchor the lineage.

Compiled for the glyph3d-js repo as prior-art/. If you build in this space and were left out, that's a bug — the email's in the repo. These notes are meant to be linked to as much as from.