Social Hardware

A computer visual that grabs the latest twitter feeds in the nearby area and displays them on the screen using particles. The user can also interact with the particles swiping them away with their hands. The technologies behind this are Openframeworks combined with the Kinects and OpenCV using an optical flow algorithm to track the motion of peoples hands through the screen space. The particle system is rendering 25,000 particles through a vector field controlled through perlin noise. Twitcurl pulls the twitter feed data from the twitter API, Pango is used to render unicode font outlines, and Openmp drives the whole thing over multiple cores at 50fps (when screen capture is not running.). There is also a dash of GLSL shaders which create the bloom (glow) effect.