CVFblog

Below are some links to projects which are similar in concept and/or design to what I hope to achieve with my final project. The below are examples of remote users affecting the output without their knowledge.

Hope vs. Despair - Twitter Mood. This project ‘captures’ the mood of Twitter users by tracking the number of smile icons and frowns icons ‘tweeted’ every thirty seconds.

Apple Matrix-Style App Board -Organised in terms of colour, this project has about 50,000 Apple App icons on-screen. Each time one is purchased (remotely) it flashes on the screen. This is not in real-time. I think visually it is very pleasing.

TweetStats captures the current trends in Twitter and displays them in graphical terms.

I particularly like Weeping Willow by Martin Luge in the way that it integrates data from sites such as MySpace and creates a beautiful physical representation – creating beauty out of something that isn’t particularly inspirational to look at. Taking the current ‘mood’ of users online, this has a direct impact on the positioning of the branches of the ‘trees’. Another example of Luge’s work of a similar style is The Rose of Jericho. In this work, it is the water supply to the plant which is controlled by the online ‘mood’ of the participants.

One site that I came recently, which is really relevant and interesting to my project, has an example called NewsAlarm that incorporates both Processing and Arduino. Taking the NewsWire API from the New York Times website, an alarm is set off everytime a particular word or phrase is ‘picked’ up by the Processing software. The site blprnt overall is excellent and has some tutorials on how to achieve this kind of work – I have had a go at the basic Twitter setup so far.

The Times Online Business page includes a ‘Need to Know’ Heatmap, which is a good way of showing information in a more visually interesting form. It also includes a brief explanation of how it works (no coding information though).