For TED 2012 at Long Beach, California, Hellicar & Lewis were commissioned to create The Dewar’s Hub. Dewars partnered with TED to sponsor its annual technology conference TED and this year debuted its interactive ‘Dewar’s Hub’.
Hellicar and Lewis collaborated with Nexus Interactive Arts to create an interactive digital installation that linked social media comment and real world TED event conversation, creating a ‘conscious graphic’.
TED attendees and offsite Twitter users could interact with The Hub by tweeting @dewarshub. The installation immediately and continuously updated as the technology conference unfolded, creating a visualisation of the social interactions at TED 2012.
The installation displayed @dewarshub tweets in the midst of a real time visualisation of all the Twitter activity at TED – drawing connections between keywords and tweets in real time. The hub also used Microsoft Kinect to allow real world users to physically change the visualisation.
The Dewar’s Hub was created using Open Frameworks to deliver a real time experience bridging the real world and Twitter.
We worked with several members of the openFrameworks community and wider development community to make the project happen:
Source code available on GitHub.
The Dewar’s Hub, TED 2012.