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OLYMPIC GAMES / BEYOND THE PARK
POSITIVE ENERGY In two temporary schemes, the London Eye links up with Twitter to deliver a nightly report on the mood of the nation and gives individuals the chance to change the London skyline.
For the duration of the Olympics, energy supplier EDF have converted the London Eye ferris wheel on the banks of the River Thames into a canvas for two special nightly shows from Sosolimited and Cinimod Studio. Sosolimited, a group of graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have created a social media driven lightshow to kick off the performance at 9pm each evening. The system uses a spe- cial algorithm to analyse Olympic related comments posted on Twitter throughout the day. Celebrations and disappointments are categorised depending on their posi- tive or negative content to produce a final percentage that indicates the ‘Energy of a Nation’.
Justin Manor, of Sosolimited helped create the technology. “The algorithm we devel- oped converts real-time social emotions into colour and motion,” he says. “We distil 24 hours of action into a 24 minute visual concert that embodies the emotional peaks and troughs of the day.”
The team wrote a C++ graphics application
on top of the OpenFrameworks library that speaks to our Twitter sentiment API and the lighting fixtures. The app grabs online data, turns the data into graphics and then sends lighting data to the fixtures with the ArtNet library.
For the second half of the hour, indi- vidual members of the public get to take control thanks to the ‘Mood Conductor’ developed by Cinimod studio. This is done either through 3d camera gesture tracking technology or with a pulse detector clipped onto the participant’s earlobe. Using both together can produce some unexpected results. Data is fed through custom software into a Pharos controller, which in turn oper- ates the existing Philips LED lighting. To this was added a Gyroscopic Lighting Converter, devised in partnership with White Wing Logic. The convertor ensures that, even as the Eye rotates, imagery is always the ‘right way up’.
www.sosolimited.com www.cinimodstudio.com
Above The 135m tall London Eye already had two rings of LED fixtures, with 64 banks of five addressable LEDs on each ring. For the Energy of the Nation, an additional 20 wash lights were added, to produce a glow on the Thames-facing side of the structure. There were also four individually controllable spot lights mounted in the plaza.
Below The first half of the nightly show translates comments on Twitter into a selection of difference lighting effects.
PROJECT DETAILS
London Eye, London, UK Client: EDF
Energy of a Nation Twitter software: Sosolimited Mood Conductor Concept & Production: Cinimod Studio Gyroscopic Converter: Cinimod Studio / White Wing Logic Project Concept and Management: Ignite London
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