MoodTree @ D&AD

A bespoke installation representing Kerve at the D&AD (Design and Art Direction) awards festival in London, our interactive "MoodTree" pulled in tweets from the event, and processed them using a complex natural language parsing algorithm to pull out key words and sentiment from Twitter. On top of that, visitors to the festival were invited to "throw a colour" at the installation using our mobile web app, injecting their splash of colour into the 24 digital lanterns hanging from the tree.

Based on a concept developed collectively in the office, I was instrumental in the design and engineering of the 2.5m tall structure and the 24 digital lanterns suspended from it, as well as developing a Node.js based server to manage instantaneous communication between the installation, the tweet-parsing system and the customer-facing web app.

The installation itself contained 28 Arduino microcontrollers, 216 LED matrices, 48 colour-changing LED strips and a Mac Mini server. Web technologies used include Node.js, MongoDB and Socket.io, as well as Stanford University’s Natural Language Processor.