Antigenic Drift 3D Map: Flu Strain Selection Simulator (3D)

This 3D companion drives the same antigenic-drift-and-strain-selection idea as the 2D version, but instead of a flat metric readout it renders the drift itself as a genuine random walk through a 3D antigenic map: the horizontal plane encodes antigenic distance between hemagglutinin variants, the vertical axis encodes the twelve months from the prior season's strain to the next flu season. A teal tube traces the true path the virus actually walks, month by month, with correlated turns whose size is set by the seasonal-change slider. A pink marker sits at the committee's meeting point — where the selection-lead-time slider decides how early they have to commit — and a violet dashed line shows their forecast, built by extrapolating the recently observed trend and corrupted by noise that scales inversely with the surveillance-quality slider. The real Euclidean distance between that forecast and where the true walk ends up twelve months later is what actually drives the vaccine-match, effectiveness and mismatch-risk readouts, and three morphing protein meshes — their surface bumps scaled by the same drift magnitude — sit at the prior strain, the vaccine strain and the true circulating variant so you can see the antigenic sites reshaping in real 3D space, not on a flat plane pretending to be one.