Family Circles currently consists of 4 web interfaces:

•   Viewer

  Is intended to render static data as a model in any page just like how you might want to show a image. The above picture is actually a svg image with a viewer overlay to show the data outlined as an interactive model.

•   Builder

  Allows you to interact and change either static data or data held in a service that supports the family circles API.

•   Explorer

  Is similar to the viewer but rather than depending on static data it requires access to a service that supports the family circles API.

•   Admin

  Used to report, clear, load, and export data from a service using the family circles API.

The viewer, builder, and explorer depend on three.js for the 3D frame work code.

The intent of Family Circles is to provide users with the ability to own and manage their own data for models. The data is JSON so it's fairly easy to read and manipulate; you can store the data on any webserver or in any html page and use it in the viewer.

If you wanted you could create and manipulate JSON directly for use in the viewer. However as your JSON file gets large this becomes rather cumbersome, and that's what the builder addresses. Through the builder you can load up static JSON files to interactively and quickly create, modify, and/or delete the contents.

When your JSON files grow really large you will find that trying to load all of it into the viewer or builder will become a bit of a chore: it may load very slow or potentially even not at all depending on the specifications of the hardware that is running your browser.

To address this issue, the service was developed. Using the admin interface you can load very large sets of data into a service then only interact with a small subset of the total data either through the builder to make changes or with the explorer to view what your interested in.