GE Olympics

GE Constellation

Technical + UX Director / Hardware + Software Developer

GE was looking for a centerpiece for the installation we were doing for them in London for the 2012 Olympics. The idea was to figure out a way to display the pulse of the Olympics in real-time. Taking inspiration from the same architectural LED lighting products GE used to light the Tower Bridge earlier in 2012 and marrying those up with Arduino to control their dimmer units the concept was born. Using the full Twitter Firehose API, tweets were filtered for relevance to the 2012 Olympics using hashtags and keywords. The tweets were then pipelined through a custom NLP routine to measure positive and negative sentiment. The results were mapped to two colors on the physical construct, which was constructed of 640 LED lighting strips controlled by OSC sent from the server to 8 Arduino microcontrollers. The overall dimensions of the Constellation were 32 feet x 16 feet x 20 feet. Over 10,000,000 tweets were visualized during the course of the 2012 Olympics.

GE Constellation Rendering
GE Constellation Build