2025 · team-member · 17-637

Dynamic 3D Research Paper Visualization Platform

Web App · 3D Visualization · Data Engineering

A 3D visualization web app for academic-paper relationships. Team project for CMU 17-637 — built in Django + Three.js, visualizes citation graphs and topical similarity across a Google Scholar dataset. David served as Sprint-1 Product Owner; Graham scraped data, Sheen led UI/UX.

Browse academic research as a 3D landscape rather than a flat list. Papers positioned by metadata (year, citations, length); filter by topic; visualize citation networks; save + collect papers per user. Team project for Web App Dev, Spring 2025 — David as Product Owner.

Hook

Academic search UIs are flat: a list of titles + abstracts, ordered by relevance. What if research discovery were spatial — papers as 3D objects you fly through, with citation edges connecting them, and year/citation-count/length driving position + size? Team 26’s Web App Dev final project builds exactly that.

Context

Course: 17-637 Web Application Development, Spring 2025 — team final project. Team of 3 (flat — no group leader). Sprint roles were distributed Agile-style, not hierarchically:

  • David Chen (davich2) — held the Product Owner sprint role: scope, sprint planning, product backlog
  • Graham — Data Scraping & Database
  • Sheen — UI/UX Prototyping

The “Product Owner” title is a sprint-level responsibility label (standard Scrum role), not a team-leadership designation — work division was peer-to-peer.

Planning artifacts in repo:

  • First-Sprint-Log.txt — sprint roles, objectives, acceptance criteria
  • Product-Backlog.txt — full feature list

Product backlog (from First-Sprint-Log)

  • 3D paper visualization driven by metadata: year, citation count, paper length
  • Filtering by topic / field / date range
  • Citation network visualization — edges between cited/citing papers
  • User accounts — login / signup / per-user persistence
  • Paper collections — save papers into user-curated sets
  • Search — query by title / author / abstract
  • Detail view — full paper metadata, abstract, citation list

Stack

  • Backend: Django + SQL (likely PostgreSQL) + Python
  • Frontend: Three.js for 3D visualization + vanilla JS for app logic
  • Data source: Google Scholar (scraped — Graham’s responsibility)
  • Auth: Django auth (standard session-based)

Status

In-progress as of scan. Only the Sprint 1 planning documents are detailed in the repo — README is a 1-line summary. Team roles + backlog set; implementation was underway.

David — confirm status:

  • Did this project ship by end of semester?
  • Is there a demo deployment (Heroku / Railway / EC2)?
  • Final presentation slides?
  • GitHub repo lost per David (previously chentianle1117/s25_team_26). This card is a placeholder based on local files until the repo is recovered or the project is reconstructed.
  • Local path: W:\CMU_Academics\2025 Spring\17637 Web App Dev\s25_team_26\
  • Related local folder: Web-Dev-Paper-Visualizer/ (appears to be an older mirror/backup; contains s25_team_26 subfolder)
  • [[2024-Fall—skill-bridge-datavis]] — David’s prior data-viz team project (same David-plus-partner pattern, different domain)
  • [[2025-Fall—semantic-canvas-thesis-tool]] — thematic sibling (both are “flatten → spatialize” visualizations)

Card built 2026-04-23 from Explore agent Spring 2025 scan. Status marked draft pending David’s confirmation that this project shipped. If it did, add final demo URL + screenshots.

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