GE Healthcare's Realtime Twitter Windows

GE Healthcare hosted an event called Healthyimagination in an old bank in midtown Manhattan. They had to build up the venue as it was pretty much gutted. Construction would occur over the course of one month, during which time they needed seven 18' tall windows covered and wanted it done in an interesting way. The concept was a 24/7 installation as a realtime data visualization of health related tweets. There were two parts to the installation - Plasma screens displaying tweets, and a word cloud spanning all windows with superbright LED's illuminating individual words as they were mentioned in status updates on Twitter. Before I jump in to the technology story, I'd like to quote Sam Ewen's post about the event from his blog OnTheGroundLookingUp.com : "The interesting part for me was to see how the flashes related to each other. How was cancer charting vs cure? Fear vs hope? In the end it was a microscosmic real-world realization of the sentiment around the subject." This statement encompasses the human element of the art installation. Special thanks to Sam once again for his special way of seeing the world around us. I'd also like to mention, this project (along with others) got attention in Brandweek's interview with Sam.

Embedded video from GEreports.com

And now for all us robots...
on to technology.

The Word Cloud

The word cloud was made up of 100 words (such as cancer, cure, nutrition, ultrasound, and balance) and printed on huge rolls of vinyl to completely cover the 18' tall windows. Next to 50 of the words were 1" circles which were cut out and replaced with a layer of high quality rear projection material made by Gerriets. Without the RP material, the LEDs only showed proof of their superbright specs at a very direct & straight-on angle. I considered diffusing the led domes with a fine-grit sandpaper but I had the RP left over from a recent multitouch table build and it immediately worked great. Once we had nice bright circles, we noticed some of the windows (facing 5th ave) got more direct sunlight than the rest of the windows and decided to add LEDs to the existing ones for double brightness. The backend hardware driving the LEDs were 3 Arduinos (all running basically the same code), two Arduinos handled two windows each, and the third handled three windows. We used three Acer netbooks (omg, i really love those things, I recommend the 11" models for sure, great balance of features) to drive the Arduinos. I know, you're wondering why I didn't use the trusty ol' ethernet shield? Well, some words came up much more frequently than others, much more. The netbooks acted like a queue manager, ensuring that the Arduino wouldn't get confused when it's own memory got hosed by a high frequency word, and possibly missing out on a low frequency word as a result. It is much easier to manage this in Processing on the netbook and hand off a reliable buffer of "blinks".

Bridging 3G to ethernet in XP

I learned of an interesting problem very late in the game, the internet connection wouldn't be available until week 3 of the 4 week installation! A pretty big deal for an installation that relies 100% on real-time updates from the internet! Sam Ewen immediately signed up for Verizon MiFi (thank you sir) which worked remarkably awesome. A very nice (and much needed) surprise, I had low expectations for being in the heart of midtown. It is a pocket sized, battery operated device which speaks to the net via 3G network and provides a LAN over wifi as well as a usb connection. I needed the network of onsite computers to all share the Mifi. I decided NOT to use a wireless bridge - I tried two brands, one needed a computer to work defeating the purpose of it's use for me (Linksys), and the other worked but was intermittently flaky (Netgear), I used my personal Acer AspireOne netbook (older model with Windows XP) and bridged the 3G connection over the ethernet port to a network switch from which the 3 Arduinos/netbooks and PC (driving the plasma displays) could all access the internet. It was a solid solution that worked for 3 weeks. We made sure the Arduinos could go into an automated "piano player" mode as I expected the 3G connection to fail at times. I was also anticipating my ethernet runs getting accidentally cut, anything is possible with so many contractors onsite over the course of a month, and this installation was the first in the house. I had the bridged netbook occasionally ping across the 3G connection. If the 3G connection needed to be re-established, I did so via automated macro (I have always loved Winbatch for this task). I kind of wish I logged these occurrences because I'm really curious about these stats, the whole system proved it's resiliency though. I went on a few trips with confidence in the system not needing me onsite.

Special thanks to Jace van Auken (pictured, he also aided on the BMX handlebars) and his buddy Richard for their electronics and soldering expertise. I was away on aeroplanes for a good chunk of this build so thanks guys for holding it down. Also very special thanks to Vicky Fang and Ken Fang (working remotely) from www.InteractiveSpaces.com for owning the job of the Plasma screens. Now that the event is over, I have a pile of LEDs and Arduino's mounted to wooden boards, time to have some fun. I spoke shortly to Psytek of a Brooklyn hackerspace called AlphaOneLabs about doing an art installation at their place for a party, I also think it'll do well as ornaments on an interactive Christmas tree - whatever ends up happening with this fun pile of tech, I'll be sure to document and post it here.