The maps use an intuitive technique for displaying latency data. The size of a circle indicates the round trip time to a host at that location. The upper left legend gives the latency scale, which is logarithmic. The unit is the millisecond, so 1000 indicates one second. This range goes from response almost like in the same room to so slow as to be unusable.
Colors indicate the number of hosts at a given latency and location.
Even on a black and white display, the different latencies are visible, and some of the differences in numbers of hosts can be seen by differences in grey scale, but the maps are best seen in color. So the IWR MPEG movies actually show the Internet in five dimensions. So far, we've been posting just the basic displayed data. It is rather amazing what can be seen in that. We will be adding interpretation and analysis as we go along.