Imagine if you would the world which is a network, with buildings being the clients/servers on that network. What in your mind does the ground between the buildings look like? For a second ground idea: What does the ground of an advanced technological world look like?

Hardware :)

Yeah, hardwarechips, with LEDs for trafficlights!

BUS for roads...

Quote:

Original post by gfxdrone Hardware :)

I thought about using hardware, however the intior of the buidings are going to be desgined like a circut board, and it dosn't have the effect I'm looking for.

but thanks for the suggestion.

To beter describe what concept I wish to visulize imagine if you will that you are a packet of data that just got sent out of a computer onto a wireless network, and can be traveling anywhere. My question is basicly what does general layout of the land look like?

well, why not go for the traditional black void?
With trails of light (other packets of data going through) where roads would be.
You could make buildings just float there in the void, with data arriving and departing on a "ground" level, or have the roads be on a multitude of levels, leaving and hitting buildings at any level (like roads in the sky).
Maybe you have read Gibson and you know what I am on about?
Essentially, if you are representing a network using a metaphore of the real world, I think you shouldn't limit yourself to a 2d plane, to just a ground level. Rather, everything floats in the ether (net, ahah, get it?) and data flows freely from node to node.
Of course, it's your artistic vision, but hey, you asked for ideas, right? :)

Otherwise I guess you could look at the surface of a Borg cube or sphere, or possibly the Death Star surface? Johnny Mnemonic has a nice representation of cyberspace, I believe Hackers had a pretty cool vision, too.

I like the black void idea, with little glowing packets of data moving about like cars or aircraft. You can take the metaphor farther though. Wired data would move along the invisable "ground" plane constrained in glowing lines, like the lane lines on a freeway, while wireless connections would be represented as trails of packets flowing through the air. Hubs or switches would be intersections of the data trails with little blinking lights that flash as a packet passes through.

A firewall would be a circular city wall around the buildings of the local network, with gates for ports (like border station check points) where the data streams pass through. A router would be a waystation (or maybe a highway on ramp) where the "streets" of the local network merge into a highway leading to the larger network.

The packet "cars" could be different colors, either according to purpose, or better yet according to direction. Incoming packets would be white, outgoing ones red, like car head and tail lights. They could be different sizes too, giant data packets like semi trucks carrying video or sound data, smaller "car sized" packets carrying requests or messages, and tiny little packets that fire off like bullets, hit a port and bounce off with a flash (changing from white to red) representing pings.

one word: Tron.