Description
Immersion is a personal email metadata visualization from the MIT Media Lab, created by Daniel Smilkov, Deepak Jagdish, and César Hidalgo. The project shows social networks, relationships, and communication patterns over time by analyzing only metadata (to, from, cc, timestamp) — not email content. It centers the email interface on people and the networks they form, rather than the standard chronological inbox which pushes users to focus on what is recent rather than important. Users connect their Gmail account and see a network graph where node size indicates communication frequency and clusters reveal social groups. The project also raises privacy awareness: the visualization demonstrates how much can be inferred about relationships from metadata alone, without reading a single message.
