From Tweets to Lightshow

The team is about to hop on a plane, heading to London for the Olympics. We will be performing a lightshow every night during the Games on the EDF Energy London Eye, and the sequencing of the visuals will be based on that day’s UK Twitter traffic.

We have written software that captures all the tweets coming out of the UK mentioning the Olympics, and are running sentiment analysis algorithms on them to determine their emotional content. The rising and falling mood of the nation with respect to the Games is charted throughout the day on a large LED wall next to the Eye, and every night at 9pm, that data is played back out across full color architectural lighting fixtures around the Eye and with large ground based search beams.

We have teamed up with EDF Energy, one of the Tier-1 sponsors of the Olympics, as well as Ignite, an amazing events company in the UK, to pull this crazy project off. If you happen to be in London for the Games, please stop by the Eye, and you’ll probably bump into one of our team onsite!